Wings Over Scotland

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.

An alert reader recently pointed us to a story we’d missed in last week’s Sun. Headed “SICK TAUNTS FOR ‘NO’ GIRL CEILIDH WATSON”, it describes the “vile internet abuse” suffered by the 2010 Miss Inverness after she appeared at the “Better Together” campaign launch. Oddly, the worst (in fact the only) example of these attacks the paper felt able to provide was one alleged “cybernat” saying “It’s amazing how low some will stoop for 15 minutes of fame”, which is a bit unfriendly but we’re not sure it quite reaches the level of “vile abuse”, particularly when directed at someone who’s voluntarily and actively involved themselves in a heated political campaign.

The piece also referred (we presume, being unaware of any other incident that fits the description) to this blog’s own brush with infamy last week, noting that we’d “posted sick images of a funeral cortege of dead squaddies passing through Royal Wooton [sic] Bassett”, apparently in response to Ms Watson speaking of her soldier boyfriend.

We still haven’t seen the launch event – there appears to be no footage of it available on the campaign’s website – so we had, and have, no idea what Ms Watson’s boyfriend does for a living. The image in question had absolutely nothing to do with him or her or anything she may or may not have said at the No campaign launch.

As for “sick images”, though, the picture we used in our mockup poster wasn’t edited in any way (except for blurring out the numberplates of the hearses in an attempt to protect the identities of the dead men, which were then spread across the internet anyway by Labour activists), so if it constitutes a “sick image” then pretty much every newspaper in Britain – including the Sun – is guilty of the same crime.

You can see the full story below, without having to visit the Sun’s website.

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*Jonathan Edwards is the Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. This piece first appeared on his own blog, but we asked if we could reprint it to bring some of its excellent insights to a wider audience. (And also to fix the original’s impressively esoteric rendering of “paraphernalia”. We’re real spelling Nazis.)

I’ve been meaning to write this blog ever since Ed Miliband’s car-crash speech on English identity. I have also taken part in a number of BBC interviews over recent months in which it is sometimes difficult to get your point across when you have an interviewer on the other end barking at you as you challenge unionist perceptions. It also supports why Leanne Woods’ intervention this week is an important one.

When the Miliband speech was being pre-briefed I had high hopes that we were about to hear something significant – that Labour were going to proclaim that their answer to the challenge posed by the SNP’s independence drive was a federal settlement for the British state. I expected Labour to position themselves as advocates of an English Parliament as the political expression of English identity. Instead what we got was hot air, followed by one of the most painful interviews I have seen by a Unionist leader on Channel 4 News.

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There seems to be a disconnect for many Scots between how they feel about the London Olympics and how they’ll act when the Games are on. Many will bemoan the cost, lost opportunities, lack of access or significant national legacy, but will simultaneously be cheering on the athletes in Team GB. Is it a form of Olympic schizophrenia that we should despise the Games and yet love them at the same time?

Schizophrenia isn’t, of course, really the correct term to use for this phenomenon. It’s a mental disorder characterised by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responsiveness. Despite the etymology of the term from the Greek roots, schizophrenia does not imply a “split mind” and it is not the same as Dissociative Identity Disorder – also known as “multiple personality disorder” or “split personality” – despite often being confused with it in the public’s perception.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that myself, and many others, suffer from a form of Olympic split personality disorder. But what is it that causes this affliction? In order to find out, we need to look at the history of London 2012.

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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.