Wings Over Scotland

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.

After the huge fuss that was made in the media about Scottish and Welsh football players not singing “God Save The Queen” during their opening games at the Olympics, we were a bit surprised to find nobody mentioning the issue after their second matches. Even a Twitter enquiry unusually failed to produce a single person who knew if they had or not, and we eventually had to go and watch the recording of Great Britain vs the United Arab Emirates on iPlayer to find out.

As it turned out, the five Welsh players in the starting 11 had stayed resolutely silent while their English comrades on the field and in the technical area all strenuously implored God to intervene in the fate of the monarch. “Again the Welsh boys in the side chose not to sing the anthem, it’s not the national anthem of Wales of course”, said the BBC’s commentator Jonathan Pearce, having seemingly failed to notice that Wales was not one of the countries taking part in the competition.

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We were intrigued by a story in Scotland On Sunday this morning, concerning the first output of a new “centre-left” group calling itself the Scotland Institute (which seems to have no website). The organisation’s debut report concludes that the “ideal” solution to the problem of poverty in Scotland is to elect “a UK-level government that is prepared to turn its back on the neo-liberal economic and social policies that have done so much damage and then a Scottish Government that can adapt that wider framework to meet the particular challenges faced in Scotland”, rather than for Scotland to become independent and elect an anti-neoliberal government of its own.

Mysteriously, however, the report neglects to identify just who this UK government “prepared to turn its back on the neo-liberal economic and social policies that have done so much damage” might potentially be. It can’t possibly be thinking of Labour, who in 13 years of Westminster power increased the gap between rich and poor, and upheld the neoliberal consensus so enthusiastically and dogmatically that Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as a “kindred spirit” (this at a time when there was still a Conservative PM in Downing Street and most of those on the left saw Blair as some sort of anti-Tory messiah) and her natural heir, while Norman Tebbit approvingly applied the same accolade to Gordon Brown.

We’re a bit concerned that an organisation we presume considers itself to be a source of serious grown-up analysis has concluded that the best solution to Scottish poverty is for Scots to somehow persuade everyone in the UK to vote for a political party that doesn’t actually exist. If it’s all the same to the Scotland Institute, we’ll continue to focus on addressing the issue via methods that aren’t entirely based on fairytales.

As the sun made its first appearance of the summer yesterday, Wings over Scotland wasn’t slow off the mark. On the “B” of the “BANG!”, we leapt onto a train for a two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely and historic south-coast town of Weymouth. It’s a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.

The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires’ yachts. (Don’t miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett’s On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you’ll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.

And if you embark on about five minutes’ leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you’ll find the town’s only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.

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When watching the Olympics over the coming couple of weeks, it’s probably not likely that you’ll be pondering the massive spending that goes into the defence and security industry as a result of such events. Yet in both superficial and deeper senses, it now represents the primary purpose of the Games, with sport merely the disguise under which the true agenda is smuggled past the unsuspecting public.

The precedent for this phenomenon was set over 70 years ago, by the event which would go on to become the template on which all subsequent Games were based. We refer, of course, to the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany.

On the 13th of May 1931, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice was intended to signal Germany’s return to the world community and its rehabilitation after the defeat and humiliation of World War I. However, two years after the award was made Adolf Hitler seized power, and spurred on by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels he set about making the games a showcase for Nazi Germany.

The intention was simple – set up the games to portray the new Germany in the best light possible. The Games were to be a place to play down plans for territorial expansion, and would be exploited to instead bedazzle foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. The opportunity to portray an image of how the Nazis wanted to be seen, with the world watching and listening, was too good to pass up, and so political will was deployed behind the Games, with Hitler himself becoming an ardent supporter.

Plans to boycott the Games in response to the maltreatment of Jews and non-whites already apparent under the regime were discussed in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands, but were short-lived. The outcry was more vociferous in America, but the President of the American Olympic Committee at the time, Avery Brundage, declined to back a boycott, on the now-familiar grounds that “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians”. Little did he know what the Nazis had in store.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.

We’re finding it hard to get worked up about the media’s latest shock-horror revelations with regard to the SNP’s policy on NATO membership. All that’s been proposed is that the party debates its position at its annual conference, and if a party’s members agree – or not – on an alteration to a policy then that’s what the party’s policy should be. It’s an exercise of the most fundamental principle of democracy, and we can’t even really be bothered pointing out the laughable hypocrisy of it being criticised by a party that refuses to tell us its policy on just about anything, including defence.

That said, we were still deeply dismayed by Angus Robertson’s performance on last night’s Newsnight Scotland. Highly-rated by most political commentators, Robertson may be a whiz at actually drawing up policy and strategy but he’s hopeless at presenting it. While SNP figures like Nicola Sturgeon, Stewart Hosie, John Swinney and the First Minister himself have provided a breath of fresh air with direct and honest answers in interviews since coming to power, Robertson seems stuck in the mindset of Westminster, and his needlessly vague, waffling and evasive responses to Isobel Fraser’s perfectly legitimate and not especially challenging questions were like stepping back in time a decade, or watching Johann Lamont now.

To be honest, we don’t really care whether an independent Scotland is in NATO or not, so long as nuclear weapons are removed permanently from Scottish waters. We struggle to see how it would affect the day-to-day life of Scottish people, and we’re not the least bit convinced it’s a matter of pressing importance to the average voter.  But what we DO regard as a danger for the SNP and by extension the independence movement is if it comes increasingly to be seen as just like all the discredited and widely-loathed Westminster parties, rather than the genuinely different alternative to the neoliberal consensus that it actually is.

Appearances like Robertson’s last night will damage the SNP far more than an entirely reasonable debate about policy at conference, which is after all the very thing party conferences are supposed to be for. We hope someone takes him aside and points out that if we wanted useless Westminster politicians, we could just stay in the Union.

The “No to independence” campaign launched last month, and at its showpiece event we listened to Alistair Darling talk of the things that we’ve shared as the United Kingdom – we heard him talk proudly, for example, of the NHS and the Welfare State. At the same time David Cameron was spelling out future welfare reforms for a system which will exclude the under 25s from housing benefit and which may lead to people on benefits in the South East receiving more money than those in the less affluent areas of Britain. Once again, David Cameron is targeting the poor and the most vulnerable in society in an effort to fix the mess that the rich and the greedy caused.

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We should be grateful for the ongoing Rangers circus. With both the Scottish and UK Parliaments now off on their summer recesses, we’re entering what newspapers traditionally call the “silly season”, where there’s little for political reporters to cover and they’re reduced to fabricating copy out of nothing to fill their sections.

Even so, the Herald’s front-page splash today is a bit desperate. Watch in amazement as the dramatic headline (“Cameron under pressure to stage vote on independence“) crumbles to pieces before your very eyes in the space of a few short sentences:

Frustration is growing in Whitehall that Alex Salmond is “dragging his feet” on sorting out key issues surrounding the 2014 poll, most notably on whether there should be one or two questions.

To be able to deliver the SNP Government’s preferred time-table, it is thought there is just a matter of months to pin down the technical details of the referendum. By next spring, if agreement has not been reached, then the Prime Minister faces a major political dilemma.

Asked if he might have to decide Westminster will legislate to hold an independence referendum in Scotland, a senior Coalition source told The Herald: “Potentially, this is a scenario he may have to face.””

So let’s break that down. “A few months” in fact means “almost a year”, while “Cameron under pressure” actually translates into “POTENTIALLY, Cameron MAY come under pressure, at some point in the fairly distant future, IF the Scottish Government’s consultation process hasn’t resolved itself in a manner everyone can live with, and IF Cameron then decides to commit electoral suicide by imposing a London-run referendum on Scotland”. Well, hold the front page.

We’re reminded of a popular Scottish phrase regarding the addition of certain physical appendages to the person of one’s grandmother in order that she might be denoted one’s grandfather. We commend the Herald on their powers of invention in a lean news period, and will now get back to our piece on what the constitutional implications will be if Michael Moore is unexpectedly revealed to be a Nazi from the moon.