Wings Over Scotland

Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you could be forgiven for thinking that the “positive case for the Union” was some sort of mythical beast, akin to the fabled unicorn. But that’s not quite the case. It did once exist, many moons ago, but has since become extinct – a victim of an ever-changing world where it was unable to compete and it couldn’t adapt to its new environment, thereby spelling its doom.

So just what was the positive case when it existed? Let’s find out.

Read the rest of this entry →

As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here’s some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you’re a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

As part of our continuing look at the people who haven’t yet their minds up about independence, we’re delighted to present this piece by Sue Lyons. If you’re a “Don’t know” too, we’d love to hear from you – why not drop us a line?

I am a mum and a wife. In point of fact, I’m an English wife married to a Scottish husband, with three English children from my first marriage and two Scottish children from my current marriage. Why would I even bother to mention that at all, you might wonder – surely it doesn’t matter where my children were born, surely I love them just the same? And you would be right.

What makes it worth mentioning is that my husband is a Scottish nationalist. In fact, he’s such a Scottish nationalist that were the UK government to say tomorrow “You can have independence for Scotland but you have to pay for it yourself”, he would say, “Where do I sign?”

He describes himself as “rabid” and he’s absolutely right – if you cut off his leg he would have a saltire running through it like a stick of rock (but not Blackpool rock, because that’s in England). Not for him the sitting on the fence that others might do, not for him the idea that you can vote for the SNP and yet still be undecided on independence. John is for an independent Scotland completely and absolutely. That sometimes causes fun and games in our own personal Union – our home.

Read the rest of this entry →

We stumbled across this old quote from a Daily Record interview with Ed Miliband earlier while we were doing something else, and we hadn’t heard it before. It’s from just after he was elected Labour leader, and it struck as us a little odd. See if you agree.

“Asked if he planned to move Britain to the left, he said: “I think that those labels don’t help. That is not the way I would see my leadership. It is not about some lurch to the left, absolutely not. I am for the centre ground of politics but it is about defining where the centre ground is.”

Ed joked his famous Marxist intellectual dad Ralph Miliband would not recognise him as a left-winger.”“

If you’ve just found yourself thinking “If you don’t have any plans to move Britain to the left, then WHAT THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU DOING AS THE LEADER OF THE LABOUR PARTY, YOU SIMPERING NEO-TORY HALFWIT? WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THE LABOUR PARTY FOR IF IT’S NOT TO MOVE BRITAIN TO THE BLOODY LEFT?” then don’t panic, gentle viewer – you’re not alone. God help us all.

May 2011 saw an earth-shaking event redefine Scottish and UK politics, when the sheer scale of the SNP victory over its opponents caught everyone – including the SNP – off guard. The shock of the Unionist parties, though, was plainest to see. Lacking a coherent response to an unforseen event they were paralysed into inaction (by a combination of disbelief, delusion and sheer terror at the prospect of Scots finally being given an unrestricted say in their constitutional future) as rigidly as a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. 

The issue for the UK parties was that at first they simply couldn't comprehend the radically different new playing field they found themselves operating on. The result was an initial reflexive reaction of poorly thought-out attacks, smears and scaremongering that were easily dismantled by both independence supporters (most famously in 2011's hugely popular "#NewScareStoryLatest" Twitter hashtag) and neutral observers.

It's the nationalists' good fortune that the anti-independence parties have taken until a mere two weeks before the local-government elections to begin to formulate a more useful response. The easy ride of obviously-ludicrous scare stories, conflicting messages and sheer shambolic ineptitude is finally, perhaps, drawing to a close.

While we can still expect to see plenty examples of the former tactics, the Unionists are no longer a rabbit in headlights. Rather, as they begin to focus their efforts with some faltering semblance of competence, we're seeing at least some signs of them turning into the symbol of Britishness they most cherish – the lion.

Read the rest of this entry →

We're sure that Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Unionist media en masse will once again line up to say that this is all just another bit of harmless fun banter and the sour-faced Nats really need to learn to take a joke. Right?

It's an extraordinary piece by Daily Telegraph leader writer Robert Colvile, following on from comments made by a former chairman of Conservative Future and current UKIP councillor, Tom Bursnall, and up-and-coming UKIP starlet Alexandra Swann, in which they suggested taking the vote away from the unemployed. Colvile's twist on the idea is that low-value members of the electorate be allowed to have a vote, but that richer people should get an extra one for every £10,000 in tax they pay.

(We're touched by the charmingly naive notion that rich people actually pay tax, and also by the choice of figures, which would imply that people earning £50,000 are no better in Colvile's eyes than filthy dole scroungers.)

Colvile's definition of low-value voters is "the unemployed, feckless and Scottish (I'm sorry if that's tautologous)", meaning that if a person is Scottish then it probably goes without saying that they're also unemployed and feckless. (Despite the fact that Scottish unemployment is lower than the rest of the UK, and Scottish employment is higher.) Yeah, we know – our sides are splitting too.

(The Telegraph, incidentally, has form on this. As recently as last year it ran another piece from a different writer also suggesting the unemployed shouldn't be allowed to vote, followed by an endorsement from the paper's deputy editor. It seems to be an idea that's gathering support.)

We look forward to the next rib-tickler. But for God's sake nobody suggest that any of this is "anti-Scottish", okay? We can't help but feel the Unionists would somehow manage to turn it into a call for Joan McAlpine to be sacked again.

…

…

[EDIT 1.44pm: We discuss this in the comments but should probably add something above the line too for the sake of clarity. As our headline suggests, Mr Colvile's defence will likely be that his piece is intended as satire, based on the 1729 Jonathan Swift tract "A Modest Proposal…" and signified by the similar title. The words "modest proposal" also appear in the Ian Cowie piece from 2011. However, even if Colvile and Cowie, and the Telegraph's deputy editor Benedict Brogan also in 2011, were ALL attempting to satirise the absurdity of the idea – something about which we have very serious doubts, given the Telegraph's political ideology and the repetition of the "joke", which hangs entirely on people getting a pretty obscure reference which in Cowie's case is buried deep in the text – it would be a stupid and irresponsible act. The reactions in the comments on all the pieces show that to many Telegraph readers the notion is, unsurprisingly, not at all ludicrous. At the very, very best, the Telegraph's writers are shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a laugh, over and over again.]

A double whammy of upbeat happy thoughts from the Huffington Post today:

Stick with the Union and there's almost no chance of Salmond burning Holyrood down!

…but vote for independence and you WILL die of cancer. We're just saying.

We’re probably all sick of the “Skintland” furore already. The sneering, condescending front cover of the Economist (coupled with a truly dreadful Photoshopped image of Alex Salmond inside which was oddly reminiscent of one on a campaign leaflet the Lib Dems had to apologise for and withdraw last year) achieved its aim of provocation, while the feature it purportedly advertised was an altogether more innoffensive beast, cobbling together some fairly bog-standard Unionist innuendo, supposition and misrepresentation amounting to nothing much that we haven’t heard a hundred times before, and which was excellently dismantled by Gerry Hassan.

The most interesting thing about the article was that it started with a preamble about the Darien Scheme, a 17th-century business venture which went horribly wrong and which anti-independence activists are very fond of bringing up as a stick to beat Scottish nationalists. This very week, for example, saw the publication (given much prominence by the Unionist media) of a report by Professor Malcolm Chalmers on the future of Scottish defence, in which the learned academic also felt it bafflingly necessary to cite the three-centuries-old events of the Darien adventure.

The Chalmers report was noteworthy not just for its politically-motivated conclusions, but also the emotive language and narrative of British nationalism running through it. We’ll deal with the report itself in more detail soon, but for this weekend’s in-depth feature we’re going to look at the theme of BritNat mythology, and in particular the re-writing of the story of the Darien Scheme to that end. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

Read the rest of this entry →

Picture special!

Pretty much every newspaper and media source ran with a particular statistic as their headline from the published conclusions of the UK government's consultation on the independence referendum. More or less everywhere led with the 75% of respondents who wanted a single Yes/No question, which is mildly curious because it's not really news – the stated preference of every party and MSP in the Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Government itself, is already for a single question.

The Secretary of State for Scotland loudly proclaimed that the consultation had therefore delivered a mandate to get on with the referendum on the UK government's terms, meaning a single question as quickly as possible and no votes for 16/17-year-olds. But the respondents to the consultation actually presented a much more significant demand: a similarly large majority of them – 72% – expressed the view that what they really wanted the UK government to do was butt the hell out altogether and give the Scottish Government the power to get on with it.

For some reason, Moore and the Scottish media weren't so keen to draw attention to that particular finding. But it would appear to mean that the electorate overwhelmingly want the Scottish Parliament – the only body which has an actual democratic mandate to hold a referendum on independence at all – to handle the entire matter without interference from Moore and his coalition colleagues.

We look forward, therefore, to the Scottish Secretary and his chums – having made their point and stated their views – keeping their noses out from now on, waiting for the Scottish Government to conclude its own (far more popular) consultation, and make its own decisions about the number and wording of the questions, the timing of the vote and the extent of the franchise. As democrats, we're sure they'll happily comply with the wishes of the people.

The agenda behind the Unionist parties and media's concerted smear campaign against the Scottish Government's independence-referendum consultation has become a little clearer today, with the publication of the full data regarding the UK Government's own survey on the subject. Which, purely for the purposes of local colour, we'll passingly note was impartially called "The Referendum on Separation for Scotland" and opens with the following words:

"We believe passionately in the United Kingdom and recognise the benefits it has brought to all of its citizens. For over 300 years the United Kingdom has brought people together in the most successful multi-national state the world has ever known. We want to keep the United Kingdom together."

(The Scottish Government consultation, in contrast, begins with the somewhat less partisan line "The people who live in Scotland are the best people to make decisions about Scotland’s future.")

Conducted by a committee on which no SNP representatives serve, the UK consultation attracted a dismal response by comparison. The Holyrood version, which is still ongoing, had as of Monday this week atttracted 11,986 contributions from members of the public so far. The Westminster report drew a pitiful 2,857 by comparison, but the picture is in fact even bleaker than that.

Of that 2,857 a staggering 1500 responses (or 53%) are believed to have come directly from the Scottish Labour website. Of those, almost half – 740 – used the exact pre-scripted wording written by Labour. (These numbers do not appear in the consultation document, but the latter was freely admitted by the Secretary of State for Scotland to several news sources this morning.)

Under the rules demanded by Labour this week for the Scottish Government's consultation, 739 of those submissions would have to be disqualified on the grounds of duplication, reducing the total number of valid responses to 2,118.

A further 101 respondents were anonymous, and another 118 were duplicate responses which didn't come from the Labour website. Removing those leaves the UK Government's consultation on the independence referendum based on just 1,899 responses from members of the public (that's one for every 34,229 people in the UK).

But perhaps more pertinent than this abysmal level of public confidence in the UK Government's consultation compared to the Scottish Government's one is the staggering degree to which Labour, rather than the general public, swamped the process in submissions. Of those 1,899 eligible responses, it would appear that 761 – or a tiny fraction under 40% – came directly from the Scottish Labour website.

So over half of all submissions, 40% of valid submissions, and an astonishing 25% of the entire consultation response made up of ineligible duplicate spam entries, came from Labour itself. Yet a compliant media has collaborated all week in creating a media portrayal of SNP "abuse" of the Scottish Government's consultation, based around just 3.5% of anonymous responses (contributions whose actual preferences, it should be noted, were not recorded, and which therefore may well in fact have been partly or even entirely from pro-Union supporters rather than nationalists).

We've said it before and we'll say it again – it's not paranoia if there really is a conspiracy against you. We doubt the electorate is all that concerned with the entire point-scoring business, but we're confident that those who are will have no difficulty in seeing the reality of what's been going on.