Wings Over Scotland

If you raise the slightest voice of dissent to the increasing fetishisation of the military in the UK these days, you risk drawing down a barrage of foul-mouthed ire on your head from furious British nationalists, inexplicably enraged at the expression of the desire not to send the sons, daughters, friends, fathers and mothers of Scotland off to die pointlessly in foreign countries where we have no legitimate business.

So it was nice to have our comments about the crass, jingoistic “commemoration” of last year’s Remembrance Day circus at Ibrox echoed this week by the joint chiefs of Scotland’s armed forces, who have ordered that the grotesque, “inappropriate” scenes will not be repeated in future. We hope the club’s fans, and others of the same mindset, will pay more attention when rebuked by such impeccable authorities than they ever would to the objections of evil traitorous cybernats like us.

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In case you missed it on Twitter, we reveal the No campaign’s Head Of Graphs:

There, that should cheer up those grumpy The Rangers fans from last night.

There are some questions that are guaranteed to bring a sudden end to any internet discussion. (In real life it’s harder for people to just vanish into thin air.) One always effective on Labour supporters, for example, is the classic “Would you rather live in an independent Scotland governed by Labour or one in the UK governed by the Tories?”

Of course, more strictly speaking that’s actually a near-certain way to ask someone to choose between Option A and Option B and every time get the answer “Non-existent Option C”. Other questions, though, are sure to solicit no response at all.

Last year, when occasionally debating with Rangers supporters about whether The Rangers International PLC (or whatever it’s called today) was a new club or not, I must have asked this one at least 60 or 70 times of 60 or 70 different people: “If they’re the same club they always were, why are they in SFL 3? They were neither relegated on the field nor demoted as a punishment, so why aren’t they still in the SPL?”

I’ve as yet never had a single response – even a bad one – to that, just instant and complete radio silence or, at the best, an abrupt change of subject. And recently I’ve discovered there’s a holy water for the Tory type of vampire too.

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Scotland on Sunday today carries an interview with Michael Moore, in which the Scottish Secretary rather undermines the No campaign’s constant demands for “detail” about an independent Scotland by admitting that the Westminster government will refuse to discuss matters like Scotland’s possible share of UK debt in advance of the referendum. There’s an even stranger passage shortly afterwards, though:

“Moore also signalled that his government would play hard-ball if Scotland did vote for independence – a scenario that would force the UK administration to negotiate an independence settlement with the Scottish administration. In the event of a Yes vote, Moore said the UK government would have to “prioritise” the interests of the English, Welsh and Northern Irish and would be unable to give the Scottish Government everything that it wanted.”

Well, duh. If Scotland votes for independence, then any UK government minister will by definition be acting on the sole behalf of “the English, Welsh and Northern Irish”. Their ONLY responsibility will be to try to get the best possible deal for those people, in a negotiation in which Scotland is on the opposite side of the table. Anything else would plainly be a gross dereliction of duty.

It’s a bit like Ally McCoist saying that if The Rangers were to be drawn against Celtic in the Scottish Cup, he would “have to prioritise the interests of Rangers fans and would be unable to give Neil Lennon everything he wanted” – true, for sure, but as much of a big fat waste of time and newsprint as leading with the front-page headline that the Sun is hot and the sea is wet.

Scotland on Sunday’s circulation fell by almost 20% in the last year.

We’ve closed two comment threads today, both of them coincidentally at the 250-comment mark, which we think is the highest ever. Both had descended into pointlessness, with small groups repeating themselves at each other and everyone complaining that everyone else was being rude. By internet argument standards they were very mild indeed, but it seemed a good time to reiterate our moderation policy.

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We had a conversation on Twitter with a fan of The Rangers this evening (though he was terribly upset at the use of the term for some reason). It was sparked by Charles Green’s latest piece of box-office wizardry, in which he gave an interview – watchable for just 99p on the club’s website – professing his fury at the Ibrox side’s apparent exclusion from league reconstruction talks and vowing to remove Rangers International Football Club PLC from Scottish football at the first available opportunity.

And on the face of it, Green has a legitimate complaint. Rule 19 (above) of the SFL Constitution expressly notes that Associate Members such as TRFC are entitled to “attend and speak at” any meeting of the League, though not to vote, and according to Green his club have in fact been completely ignored in the discussions. But beyond that, it’s extremely hard to actually work out what his beef is.

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The Scottish football media has apparently become suddenly convinced that the SPL’s proposed 12-12-18 league reconstruction plan is going to happen, and very possibly as soon as next year. Today’s papers are full of analysis of the story, but as usual it’s pretty shallow stuff which appears to miss all the main implications in favour of a simplistic “is it confusing for the fans and where would it leave Rangers?” dual angle.

So with the usual apologies to the football-hating politics fans, let’s have a wee delve.

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Against our better judgement, we found browsing the Twitter feed of the Labour MP for Glasgow South (remember him?) on Friday for the first time in several months, after some irresponsible person (specifically this one) drew our attention to the fact that Tom was still boasting proudly about the Downfall-parody video clip that got him in trouble last year. And a couple of things struck us as at least vaguely interesting.

One was the “biog” entry below the avatar, which is a variant on a well-known chant often aired by fans of defunct Glasgow football club Rangers FC – “Nobody likes us, we don’t care”. It seems an odd, confrontational attitude to adopt for someone who relies entirely on being liked by the public to still have a job.

But it was the rest of the feed that revealed the oddest thing.

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The modern Scottish independence movement is 84 years old, dating back to the 1928 formation of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. It is a peaceful, inclusive, civic and democratic movement – to the best of our knowledge, and almost uniquely, not a single life has been lost in pursuit of Scottish independence.

Despite this, so-called “Unionists” (more properly described as British nationalists) still regularly try to portray independence campaigners as violent racists. As recently as a few days ago, one prominent Labour activist frequently employed as a commentator on BBC Scotland political shows attempted to perpetuate baseless (but oft-repeated by Unionists) 70-year-old smears that the former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was a Nazi sympathiser engaged in attempts to collaborate with the Germans during WW2, sabotage the British war effort and set up a Vichy-style government in Scotland. These claims were cited, astonishingly, as evidence of “the SNP’s fascist past”.

Such attacks are all the more bizarre given the constant reminders on the news that the only nationalists attempting to secure their goals by violence in the United Kingdom are those who do so in the name of Britishness, waving the Union Jack.

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[FOOTBALL KLAXON.]

Okay, this has gone on long enough. We’ve been trying for quite a few months now to get anyone to explain something to us, and nobody ever has an answer. We’ve sat and watched with our heads in our hands as the SPL and SFL have competed to come up with the most bonkers, convoluted proposals for the reconstruction of Scottish football.

The SPL want two leagues of 12 splitting into three leagues of eight then merging back into two leagues of 12 again at the end, plus a league of 18 that just bumbles along feeling a bit left out of all the splitting fun. The SFL counters with a bizarre 16-10-16 (or possibly 16-10-18) system that has nowhere near enough fixtures in it, but proposes to fill the gaps with playoffs and by padding out the least popular competition in the Scottish game – the League Cup.

And all the while everyone pointedly ignores the most successful league system ever created in Scotland, which by coincidence was also the least embarrassingly stupid one, and which never ended with the team in 8th place in the final table having more points than the team in 5th place while all the other leagues laughed at us.

Please, for the love of God, someone tell us why.

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Crivvens. We were rooting around in Google Analytics (the thing that records website traffic) today. It’s a service we only signed up to at the start of March, which among other things means our cumulative lifetime pageviews statistic is probably understated by around 100,000. But the startling thing we discovered was something else.

Since we started tracking “unique visitors” in March (statspeak for the number of different identifiable people who’ve come to the site at least once), Wings Over Scotland has been read by just over 125,000 people. That’s… wow. That’s a lot.

Obviously many just pass through after following a link from somewhere and never come back, and a typical single month will only see about a fifth of that number, but around 80% of our readers each month are return visitors – increasingly, people who come here once come back again. (So once more, we’ll be making no apologies for publishing the occasional story about Rangers when merited…)

That’s not just down to the editorial contributors – we’re proud to have some of the most informed commenters in the blogosphere too, who not only tip us off to stories worth covering but also provide new angles and ways of thinking about stuff that hadn’t occurred to us. So if you’re one of the 99% who read but don’t comment, speak up. We, and an increasingly large number of other people, want to hear from you.

There’s already been an avalanche of cobblers talked about yesterday’s surprise verdict of the First Tier Tribunal on alleged tax evasion by Rangers. RFC fans are triumphantly howling vindication for their claims that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy, insisting the verdict shows the club hadn’t been cheating for a decade and that it should still be playing in Scotland’s top division. The club’s former chairman even told Scotland Tonight that it wouldn’t have gone into administration at all, let alone liquidation, if not for the pressures caused by the infamous “Big Tax Case”.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is mostly painting a picture of unadulterated victory for, and terrible injustice against, the Ibrox club. But let’s see if we can cut through the persisting fog, establish some solid facts and lay a couple of myths.

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