Wings Over Scotland

Lord McConnell got the velvet-lined kid-gloves treatment from Scotland Tonight last night over his calls for the pro- and anti-independence campaigns to have a two-week ceasefire during the Commonwealth Games. Mysteriously, the programme didn’t feel it was at all relevant to draw comparisons to how the No camp behaved during the last major sporting event that took place in the UK.

No, definitely no politicking going on there.

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It was nice to get a wee plug this morning on Radio Scotland’s always-interesting “Headlines” programme. Their online round-up talked about our piece on Scandinavian taxation, and contrasted it with one written by Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser for the right-wing “ThinkScotland” blog, in which he disputed the widely-held, and oft-decried by Yes supporters, notion that the UK was one of the most unequal countries in the civilised world.

Now, anyone who’d also read Wings columnist Julie McDowall’s superb, blood-boiling article on foodbanks in today’s Sunday Herald might naturally be rather sceptical of Fraser’s claim that the UK was an egalitarian paradise of wealth distribution, but he provided a link, so we had a look.

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One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.

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We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:

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That was always a pretty silly lyric. But anyway.

We had to switch the telly off after about 10 minutes of the news this morning. The piety was too much to take. So intead we’re just going to quote two things from the avalanche of comment that’s appeared this morning on the death of Nelson Mandela.

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Latvia has been ruled by others for most of the past thousand years, with Riga even being the largest city in Sweden until they carelessly lost it to Peter the Great in 1710. Independence from Russia came in 1918 and then from the Soviet Union in 1991.

I arrived in Riga a few months later and stayed for a year and a half. At the time I joked that, apart from my paid work, I was there to observe what they were going through and to take notes for when Scotland became independent. It’s been a long time but some things, I hope, will be relevant to the process over the next year.

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Every country on Earth is the best at something.

We can do better than this, right?

(Data)

As a NATO member state with a strategically important position in the North Atlantic yet essentially no military at all, Iceland represents an intriguing counterpoint to the arguments of the No campaign that an independent Scotland would be somehow dangerously vulnerable to attack from enemies unknown.

Earlier this year, the Icelandic Review of Politics and Administration published a paper looking at the implications of Scottish independence for Scotland, the rUK and the rest of NATO. An alert reader sent it to us a while ago and we’ve just got round to reading it all the way through. (It’s a modest 16 pages, but hey, we’re pretty busy.)

It conclusions are rather less doom-laden than those of the UK government.

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We must confess, we’ve never quite understood the No campaign’s longing to turn the independence referendum into one on Alex Salmond. The First Minister certainly divides opinion, but his personal ratings are consistently more impressive (and by a considerable distance) than poll figures for Yes.

The latest one we could find (from a month ago) suggests that if the referendum question was “Do you want to entrust Scotland’s future to Alex Salmond?”, the Yes side would win by an 11% margin on an 85% turnout.

So it makes stuff like this, from today’s Sunday Herald, all the more puzzling.

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Below is an extract from an article published in the US quarterly Dissent Magazine, entitled “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark”.

We tweeted a link to it yesterday but dismayingly nobody seemed to notice it (not a single retweet last time we looked), and it really deserves reading. It’s an aspect of Nordic social democracy and gender equality that you don’t hear much about.

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It’s not directly related to Scottish independence, but we were disturbed to be alerted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray to a piece of recent BBC coverage. A friend of ours has helpfully cut down the video footage in question to just the important parts, and saved it in case of sudden disappearances. You should probably watch them.

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It’s amazing what a trip away can do: refresh, educate, put a new slant on an old debate. I was in the US recently. The first thing I learned was before departure, and I pass it on as a tip: if you’re going to the US, fly from Dublin, not a UK airport. Apart from being about half the price – presumably because they have control over their airport taxes, so can adjust them to compete with Heathrow – it makes life far easier.

When I last flew to the US from a UK airport, long before 9/11, we were held in a bleak corridor without any amenities for well over an hour before being processed through immigration, where we were interrogated about the purpose of our visit, what address we were staying at, and where we were going exactly. It put me off re-visiting the States for a long time.

Flying from Dublin is a different experience.

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