Wings Over Scotland

We noticed the image below doing the rounds on Twitter this morning, and were mildly surprised to trace it back to the official “Better Together” campaign account. Alert readers will already have noticed us satirically characterising it (in a tweet) as a claim that all but one of Scotland’s medal-winners at London 2012 were actually English, but in fact it’s something a little bit stranger than that.

Because what the image actually says is “Hey, Scotch people! Under successive UK governments you’ve suffered such chronic underinvestment in your sporting facilities that every talented athlete in Scotland has had to travel hundreds of miles from their home, leaving their families and friends behind, in order to get adequate training!”

We’re not sure that’s quite the red-hot selling point for the Union they think it is.

We mean cyberBritNats, of course. Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony brought a charming collection of positive Unionists out of the woodwork with moving, heartfelt words of British unity such as these. We’re choking up a little even now as we type.

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We’re indebted to keen Wings Over Scotland reader “Holebender” for digging out this little nugget. Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, is at the forefront of Labour’s demands for the Scottish Government to hold a single-question referendum on Scottish independence, regardless of whether the Scottish electorate might want a third option. But it turns out Ian hasn’t always been quite so keen on restricting voters to straight yes/no choices.

Back in February 2008, he wrote to Nick Clegg about the Liberal Democrats’ proposed referendum on UK membership of the EU. You can find the full original text of his letter at this page on the Conservative Home website. Just for a bit of fun, though, we’ve reprinted it below with some extremely minor adjustments.

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What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Prince Charles:

“This is a scandal and an anachronism. The idea that the Prince has a right to be consulted on legislation which might impact on his interests belongs to a bygone era.” (Daily Mail, March 2012)

What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Ian Davidson MP:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.” (Newsnight Scotland, August 2012)

Something’s not quite the same, but we can’t put our finger on it. Can anyone help?

There’s currently some dispute between the Scottish and UK Parliaments over who should ultimately determine the nature and details of the independence referendum currently scheduled for autumn 2014. The Scottish Government is adamant that the referendum must be run by Holyrood, the only place where a mandate for the vote exists. The Scottish Affairs Select Committee at Westminster, on the other hand, is vehemently proclaiming its own rights, as expressed by the committee’s chairman Ian Davidson MP on Newsnight Scotland earlier this week:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.”

There are arguments to be made, constitutionally speaking, for both viewpoints. Legal experts are divided on their interpretations of relevant law, and it seems unlikely that a definitive judicial consensus could be reached without legislation being brought forward and then challenged in court, a time-consuming and expensive process which could bog the referendum down for years.

How, then, might we break the deadlock? Well, a fundamental principle of law is that the arbiters of a decision should where possible not stand to gain personally from any particular outcome of it. And as it happens, one side in this particular dispute is operating under a vested interest that’s just about as big as they get.

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When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

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We must confess to rarely finding ourselves either surprised or impressed by the Scotsman. Today, though, is one of those days. The staunchly Unionist paper’s leader column features a detailed assessment of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee’s latest pronouncements on the independence referendum, and it’s a damning one.

Under the headline “Law derives authority only from the people it serves”, the piece basically reprises this site’s feature from last weekend on sovereignty, and dismisses the report’s findings as in essence an irrelevant technicality, lecturing that “it is clear the committee has fundamentally misunderstood the way modern democracy works”.

The column’s appraisal of the political reality is unambiguous:

“The law only derives its authority from the people it is there to serve. No court, in Scotland or the United Kingdom, whatever its formal powers under law, can flout the will of the people. No court can say to the Scots: “This far and no further”. The select committee might like to ponder on this before attempting to fix the boundary of the march of the nation by putting spurious legal impediments in the way of the people determining their future.”

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic statement this is. Accusing the report of relying on biased “experts” for its conclusions, the editorial is a humiliating slap-down to Ian Davidson and the other members of his committee, which is left looking petty, partisan, arrogant and foolish even in the eyes of its own supporters. It also represents a direct and unequivocal assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, over the Westminster parliament the committee is a mouthpiece for.

We can only speculate as to whether the column is motivated by a genuine belief in that principle or by a realisation of the tactical blunder the Unionist parties have made, but either way it’s a remarkable development. We wouldn’t want to be in Mr Davidson’s shoes right now. One of his most steadfast allies has just given him a doing.

We think it’s quite cute that the Scottish Affairs Committee still imagines it can get away with presenting itself as a neutral arbiter when releasing the findings of an investigation with the pejorative title “The Referendum on Separation for Scotland”.

We also can’t help but admire the determination of the Unionist parties who stood in both Westminster and Holyrood elections on a platform of implacable opposition to any referendum taking place at all, in asserting that they nevertheless have the right to dictate the terms of such a vote after the Scottish electorate overwhelmingly elected the only party promising one.

What we don’t understand is quite what they’re trying to achieve.

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We can’t really be bothered working ourselves up into an outrage about the despicable behaviour of a number of Unionist politicians (far less the angrily triumphant online hordes of British nationalists) in the immediate aftermath of Andy Murray’s magnificent gold medal in the Olympic tennis. GA Ponsonby has written an excellent analysis of the No camp’s mindset over on NNS that we can’t add much of value to.

All we’d like to point out is that the normally relatively-sensible Tory MSP Murdo Fraser has made an even bigger clown out of himself than it initially appears if this tweet from yesterday afternoon is what he genuinely believes:

Quite aside from the crass ugliness of attempting to politicise Murray’s victory at all (on the basis of an embarrassed, half-hearted mumbling of a couple of lines of “God Save The Queen”), Fraser’s comment is wrong on the most fundamental level.

Nationalists do NOT want to “destroy” Team GB, only to leave it and compete in our own right, thereby sending far MORE Scottish athletes to the Olympics to realise their dreams than is possible in a combined team. If and when Scotland becomes independent Team GB will continue to exist, and will take part in the Games with the best wishes of most Scots (except when it’s in competition with us, of course).

For his own personal ideological and political reasons, Murdo Fraser wants to see fewer Scots winning medals in the Olympics than there could be – and indeed fewer English, Welsh and Northern Irish athletes too, since a Scottish team would obviously free up more spaces in the GB ranks for them. For the sake of petty politics, he wants there to be fewer people from these islands at the Olympics. We want there to be more. We’re not sure how that makes us the small-minded ones.

As part of their desperate attempts to politicise the Olympics, a number of Unionist pundits and comedians have this week been pointing out that some of the talented Scottish athletes who’ve won medals wouldn’t have been able to do so were they not able to join together in a team with English, Welsh and Northern Irish competitors.

This is, of course, perfectly true and fair comment (though it’s also a fact that Scotland would be likely to have around four times as many competitors at the Games as an independent nation as it does within “Team GB”, and Union Flag-waver Sir Chris Hoy would have been able to defend the individual cycling title he so brilliantly won in Beijing 2008 rather than being pushed out in favour of an English rider).

However, when set against the ability to expel Trident nuclear submarines from Scottish waters, to protect the NHS from Tory privatisation, to save Scottish soldiers from dying in illegal foreign wars, to keep university tuition available to everyone rather than just the rich, to avoid mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren with crippling PFI bills, to look after our elderly and sick with free personal care and prescriptions, to build new social housing rather than condemn tens of thousands to homelessness, to power our country with clean, renewable energy rather than risking another Fukushima, and most of all to never again in our lifetimes be ruled by a Tory government, to be quite honest this blog would willingly sacrifice half of a gold medal in the Lightweight Women’s Rowing (Double Sculls) every four years, and the rest.

Maybe our priorities are just off. Sorry.

After we wrote this morning’s piece on party membership figures, we thought it might be interesting to look into what we’d initially intended as a throwaway last-line joke. Disturbingly, what we found out was that even in a society so tightly regulated that you can be fined thousands of pounds for using the word “summer” in the wrong place or threatened with imprisonment for making rude comments on Twitter, it’s apparently completely legal for our politicians to tell us outright lies.

We’re not talking about matters of opinion or interpretation or spin here. We mean that as far as we can establish, our politicians can openly lie to us about empirical, measurable facts, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.

The thing that sparked our inquiry was Scottish Labour’s assertion on its Twitter page that it’s “Scotland’s largest political party”.

Now, as far as we can make out, that statement isn’t true in any meaningful sense whatsoever. In so far as it’s possible to establish, Scottish Labour has thousands fewer members than the SNP, collected 300,000 fewer votes in the last Scottish election, has fewer MSPs and fewer councillors than the SNP, and generates much less money. But that’s not really the point.

One reader suggested to us that the basis for the party’s claim is that it has more elected representatives than any other if you include Westminster MPs as well as Holyrood ones. While it’s stretching grammar to its breaking point to suggest that that constitutes being the “largest political party” in any sense that an average person would interpret the term, we can see how there’s just about a semantic defence.

But the point is that even if there wasn’t, there isn’t anything we could do about it.

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After several weeks asleep, the Scottish political scene has stirred itself into a bit of life today with several interesting bits of news. The one that most caught our eye was a piece by Michael Crick for his Channel 4 blog, which noted the catastrophic collapse in Lib Dem party membership numbers – down an eyewatering 25% in a single year since entering a coalition government with the Tories.

The post is chiefly concerned with UK party membership, pointing out that Labour had gained all of 39 members in the same period (despite Harriet Harman putting the figure at a slightly more impressive 65,000) and also noting that the Tories didn’t release any UK membership stats. Buried away in the second-to-last paragraph, however, is the fact that SNP membership grew by a hefty 24% over the same 12 months, and has apparently jumped a further 16% in the first half of 2012 to stand at 23,376. That’s a massive 44% increase in 18 months.

(On current trajectories, the SNP will overtake the UK-wide Lib Dems well before the next UK election, and indeed before the independence referendum.)

Scottish Labour, meanwhile, are inexplicably shy of revealing their membership, and have been for some time. A couple of years ago the Caledonian Mercury looked into some odd discrepancies in their stats, and concluded that while Labour were claiming to have 20,000 members in Scotland, some extremely creative counting meant that the real number was likely to be much closer to half that.

In any event, it seems certain that the SNP has now overtaken even Labour’s wildest and most Stalinist estimates of its own membership in Scotland, which means that we won’t be hearing any official figures from Labour any time soon. We can’t blame them for that – we’d want to hide the fact that our main rivals were now twice our size too. But given that Scottish Labour still claims to be “Scotland’s largest political party” (and also claims on its website to have a “growing membership”), perhaps there might be a case for the Advertising Standards Authority to investigate.