Wings Over Scotland

Can you spot what’s strange about this statement, viewers?

“We believe that the process of setting a single question should be taken out of the hands of elected politicians and given to relevant experts the public can have faith in.”

It comes from the mouth of Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont, and forms part of her latest demand – along with her two partners in the Unionist coalition – that the Scottish Government should allow the defeated opposition parties to dictate the terms and conditions of the implementation of the flagship policy behind which it was so resoundingly and unprecedentedly elected a little over a year ago.

(Note in particular the sneaky way the overt demand also slips in a covert demand.)

We’re pretty sure that a general election is already, pretty much by definition, the primary means by which the public expresses who it does and doesn’t “have faith in”. We have, on the other hand, absolutely no way of knowing how much faith that same public does or doesn’t have in the ironically-unelected Electoral Commission, which is appointed by – who’d have guessed it? – the UK Parliament. And just by the by, below are a couple of other relevant snippets from the Commission’s Wikipedia entry:

“The Electoral Commission has a number of responsibilities in relation to referendums. These include:

• commenting on the wording of the referendum question (the government is responsible for proposing the wording)

The Commission has no legal position in the legislation concerning referendums proposed by the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations.”

Our emphasis, there. So, and we admit this is just a crazy madcap idea we’re putting out there, maybe the business of government should properly be conducted by the people the electorate have democratically chosen to do the job, no?

From this morning’s Telegraph: the Union option.

From this morning’s Sunday Herald: the independence option.

The Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour back option 1. The pro-independence parties (SNP, Greens, Socialists, Solidarity) all back option 2. It’s up to you.

It’s been remarkable watching the awkward reactions of Alex Salmond’s detractors to his appearance at the Leveson inquiry yesterday. Over two hours of questioning didn’t manage so much as a scratch on the First Minister, with even ardent Unionist hacks forced to admit that Salmond was “skooshing” the proceedings and describing it as an “effortless stroll” for the SNP leader. Even the Herald’s Iain Macwhirter, a normally-intelligent commentator recently driven half-demented by hatred for Murdoch, was forced to concede that Salmond had sailed through unharmed.

With opposition politicians and activists (and even some supposedly-loyal nationalists) having long been forecasting a humiliating inquisition for Salmond at the hands of Robert Jay, there’s currently a great deal of sour muttering and embarrassed shuffling of feet going on in Unionist ranks, personified on Newsnight Scotland last night by Labour’s unfortunate Paul Martin, who didn’t seem to quite know what to do with himself except mumble some vague waffle about there having been no conclusive proof that the Scottish Government maintaining cordial relations with one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers would likely be beneficial to Scottish employment.

The depressing thing about the opposition’s reaction is its sheer petulance and intellectual bankruptcy, typified by a thoroughly dispiriting argument we had yesterday. It doesn’t matter how comprehensively, how often or by whom the SNP are cleared of any sort of wrongdoing, or how many rational, logical, sensible explanations for things are offered – Labour and the other opponents of independence simply turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, flatly refusing to accept any reality they don’t like and endlessly repeating their demands for “answers”, even though they’ve just been given them.

For the record and easy reference, though, we’ll quickly run through them again below.

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Since the disaster that befell our Super HypocrisOMeter 5000, we’ve been pretty careful with our equipment budget. But this week, after being caught on the hop by the unexpected early conclusion to the Rangers CVA saga, Wings Over Scotland has taken the plunge and invested in another electronic aid to help us stay that all-important one step ahead of the zeitgeist.

The SeeAhead Industries Predictamatic XF12 is the state of the art in digital foresight technology, and we put it straight to work to see if it could give us some advance knowledge of how Alex Salmond’s appearance at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon will turn out. The contents of the Device Output Log can be seen below.

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We couldn’t agree more. (Click to enlarge image.)

Thursday night’s Question Time from Inverness saw Johann Lamont once again trot out the line that the independence referendum doesn’t offer Scotland its only realistic chance of escaping Tory government for the forseeable future. Once again, the Labour quasi-leader insisted (56m 50s) that the choice between independence and the Tories was a false one, and that her party provided a genuine ideological alternative to the right-wing neoliberal philosophy which has dominated UK politics since 1979.

Unfortunately, that’s a lie. And the really troubling thing about it is that it means NOBODY is speaking for the majority of the British population, which almost certainly means that no mainstream political party is interested in representing your views. Which, you might think, is a pretty odd way to be running a supposed democracy.

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A surprise development today, as the moribund and long-neglected LabourHame website sprang suddenly back to life with its fourth post in as many months. And what a stirring comeback it was, as the party’s Shadow Secretary Of State for Scotland Margaret Curran launched into a vitriolic diatribe awkwardly entitled “Absurd to claim a separate Scotland would continue to be part of Britain“.

(There was plenty of room left in the headline to turn the car-crash grammar into English, for example by prefixing it with the words “Why it’s”.)

The centrepiece of the article’s argument was Curran’s unequivocal assertion that “Britain is the country we live in, not the island it exists on”, which is a claim only slightly spoiled by being completely factually wrong in every respect. Rather than waste all afternoon explaining why, we’ll just quote the Wikipedia entry and let you get on with your day. If you’re really pressed for time, you can stop after the first sentence.

“Great Britain or Britain (Welsh: Prydain Fawr, Scottish Gaelic: Breatainn Mhòr, Cornish: Breten Veur) is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, the largest European island, and the largest of the British Isles. With a population of about 60.0 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populous island in the world, after Java and Honshu. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west. Politically, Great Britain may also refer to the island itself together with a number of surrounding islands which comprise the territory of England, Scotland and Wales.

All of the island is territory of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and most of the United Kingdom’s territory is in Great Britain. Most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, as are their respective capital cities: London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

The Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the political union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland with the Acts of Union 1707 on 1 May 1707 under Queen Anne.”

You’d hope someone aiming to be the Secretary of State for a part of somewhere would at least have a grasp of the most rudimentary geopolitical facts about it, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Scottish Labour.

It’s been months since we freed an interesting piece of writing from behind a paywall, but this opinion column from today’s Times deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in the nationalist cause, and we can’t claim to be experiencing any great guilt about depriving News International of 0.0000001p in order to bring you it.

It’s an analysis of Ed Miliband’s bizarre “Englishness” speech yesterday (which gets odder and odder the more you examine it), and aside from making the lazy, clumsy but common error of asserting that Labour can’t win in England alone it’s a thoughtful and interesting piece highlighting the contradictions between Miliband’s assertions and depictions of Englishness and his Unionism. Read it below.

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Ed Miliband, the nation was famously told a while back, “gets” Scotland. The Labour leader has done his damnedest to prove that assertion wrong ever since, first telling Scots that they were simply a stepping stone in getting Labour back into power at Westminster – helping the Scottish party to its disastrous defeat in 2011 as a result – and then not being able to remember the names of the Scottish Labour leadership candidates, despite there only being three of them, a few months later.

(To be strictly fair to Miliband, he did also show some perceptive insight in April 2011, noting that “I think people are really focusing on this question: who do you want standing up for Scotland against the Conservative-led Government in London?” just before the Scottish electorate delivered their crushingly unequivocal answer.)

“Definitely not Red” Ed’s latest brainwave to win over the reluctant voters of Her Majesty’s Great Empire Of Britain (Northern Administrative Region) is to tell Scots it’s not just up to them to decide whether Scotland becomes independent or not. Doubtless inspired by a ComRes poll in today’s Independent showing just 30% of English and Welsh voters want Scotland to leave the Union (far fewer than most previous surveys), Miliband will today tell a London audience that England “must have its say”. What isn’t clear is what he actually meant by that.

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We’ve seen lots of UK media running stories about US satirist Jon Stewart’s mocking report on American coverage of the Diamond Jubilee, fronted by an extra-oily Piers Morgan. It’s pretty funny, but sadly everywhere we’ve seen it posted (except Gawker, which only has the first four minutes of eight) uses the same broken embedded stream, so you can’t actually watch it. Until now, that is.

YouTube’s fiendish software somehow knew that it was a clip of a copyrighted show and immediately threw a prissy little huffy-fit, which stops us embedding it here, but you can right-click on the image and download the video file, or just left-click to watch.

(We recommend the former for speed and convenience – if you choose to stream by left-clicking, there’ll be a pause of a few minutes while it buffers before playing.)

Enjoy some chuckles, and note with passing interest that to our cousins across the pond, the words “England” and “UK” are still interchangeable. Either that, or they have a surprisingly astute grasp of how little Scotland cares.

Wings Over Scotland had a staff outing to London this weekend. We went on Saturday to avoid the Jubilee crowds and the rain, with great success on both fronts – it turned into a beautiful hot summer’s day by the afternoon, and the city was as deserted as we’ve ever seen it. (The Underground, in particular, was eerily quiet almost everywhere, with empty platforms, tunnels and ticket halls as far as the eye could see. At times it was like a scene from 28 Days Later.)

Compared to the last time we found ourselves in the capital on the eve of a big Royal event, there was surprisingly little activity. Plenty of Union Jack bunting and flags littered the streets, but though we crossed the Thames several times, including by London Bridge and the Millennium Bridge, there were no enthusiasts camped out to stake their prime viewing places for the next day.

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Just a quick one, as we’re obviously very busy today putting out our Union Jack bunting and preparing our street party. Kenneth Roy of the Scottish Review, along with Peter “Moridura” Curran, is one of the Cranky Old Men of the nationalist movement, and we have to admit we often find his work rather hard going, for all its worthiness – not least because of the abominable, near-unreadable layout of the SR website.

It’s currently running a series (comprising an unknown number of parts) about the Lockerbie bombing, and the first piece was a bizarre, crotchety attack on the grammar of the Scottish Government’s official statement about the death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The second, however, which we link to in its slightly less eye-mangling reproduction on Newsnet Scotland, is unmissable.

If you’ve got Lockerbie fatigue, don’t worry – it’s only passingly about the events of that grim night in 1988. Instead, it sends out a powerful and damning message about democracy, and in particular the public accountability of governments to the people. The message could be summed up as “use it or lose it”, but if you read nothing else today we urge you to read Roy’s rather more evocative illustration.