Wings Over Scotland

Positive to the last, Scottish Labour go down punching.

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You might not think it, readers, but even after all this time we’re still capable of a certain degree of innocent, naive trust in Scottish journalism.

When Nicola Sturgeon didn’t just issue a boilerplate condemnation at FMQs yesterday after ludicrously overblown allegations of Twitter “trolling” by an SNP candidate, but went on the counter-attack over Labour’s grotesquely abusive Ian Smart, we foolishly thought that might make both sides of the story newsworthy.

And then we opened the papers.

We don’t expect the media to be impartial. But let there today officially be an end to even the slightest pretence that it’s at least fair, professional and honest.

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The story in yesterday’s Scotsman carrying outrageous and defamatory slurs against me has today vanished from its website. There’s nothing by way of an apology or correction in the paper’s usual page 2 corrections column, however, and there’s been no reply to either my email of yesterday morning or the letter our solicitor sent yesterday afternoon. Be assured, readers, that the matter won’t rest there.

But today things are even more interesting.

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We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.

So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.

And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.

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As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)

His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.

If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.

To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.

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Two ostensibly-unrelated stories from today’s Scottish press leap out at each other with such force you fear the collision could almost create an actual thunderstorm.

“Benefits reform ‘to force 1 in 4 into poverty'”, roars Scotland On Sunday’s second-top story above a curiously makeover-ish picture of Margaret Curran and news of a report by the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations which predicts that hundreds of thousands of children and vulnerable women (in particular) will be pushed into financial catastrophe by the Westminster government’s benefit cuts.

Curran is then quoted as attacking the UK coalition because it’s “prepared to cut the incomes of hard-working Scottish families at a time when people are already struggling to make ends meet”, and demanding “welfare reform that works”. Which makes a story in this morning’s Sunday Herald all the more bewildering.

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So that’s where Johann Lamont’s been hiding all this time. Evidently she was holed up somewhere learning her speech to the Scottish Labour conference off by heart, and she demonstrated the fact by rattling the whole thing out in practically a single breath. There was barely a gap left for the party faithful to applaud in, though they dutifully roared with laughter at a succession of limp anti-SNP jibes.

In fact, most of the speech was devoted to attacking the SNP rather than putting forward any positive ideas. The word “Salmond” appeared more times in the text than “justice”, “fairness”, and “jobs” put together, and by a distance at that. (“Socialism” and “Miliband” both scored zero.) It was a safety-first, preach-to-the-choir speech from a leader making her debut in the position, and who it’s probably fair to say isn’t a natural orator. But it’s hard to see who it would appeal to outside of the Caird Hall.

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We’re all used to the modern “apology”. You know, the one where someone does something idiotic and then says “I’m sorry if anyone was offended”, rather than “I’m sorry for the idiotic thing I did”, cunningly turning what’s ostensibly an apology into the opposite – an attack on the reader/viewer for being so pig-thick as to have plainly or wilfully misunderstood the actually-perfectly-reasonable thing the offender said or did, and which they’ve been forced into unwillingly pretending to regret.

Labour troll-in-chief Tom Harris MP, however, may have taken this artform to a new high. He’s lasted less than a month in his new job as the party’s official “Twitter czar” before having to quit after posting a video on YouTube which portrayed Alex Salmond as Hitler (or more precisely, the other way round), and reacted with the sour bad grace anyone who’s had interactions with Harris online would have come to expect.

“The video I posted has been a well worn joke used to parody a range of public figures. However, context is everything and in the context of Johann [Lamont]’s and my desire to improve the level of political debate on social media and the context of Joan McAlpine’s much more serious statements about all political opponents of the SNP being anti-Scottish, my actions have been an unhelpful distraction for which I apologise.”

Did you get that? Tom is apologising, not for likening the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland to a fascist dictator responsible for the murder of millions of innocent civilians, but for causing an “unhelpful distraction”, ie for damaging his OWN party with his buffoonish antics. Furthermore, he’s using this “apology” to actually repeat the attack, by shamefully continuing to misrepresent the recent comments by SNP MSP Joan McAlpine which were the subject of the spoof clip.

Now let’s be clear. The only thing offensive about the video in itself is what a tired, lame old joke it was – “Downfall” spoofs were already old hat in 2009, to the extent that even the fusty old Telegraph was making that point.

(On a personal level, while this site just about sees the humour value in the first one or two, all the literally hundreds of feeble imitators which followed it have achieved is to distastefully cheapen one of the best and most powerful films of this century.)

But Tom Harris has spent most of the last six months piously crying about nasty, bullying “cybernats” on the internet, deliberately blowing up the tiniest of slights – or even completely inventing them – so that he can manufacture fake offence at the supposed poisonous bigotry of the SNP.

(Tom nearly always blames “the SNP” explicitly for the opinions of random internet users, despite usually having no evidence that any of the people in question are members or even supporters of the party, far less controlled or directed by it.)

The particularly startling thing about this case, though, was that just minutes before posting his Hitler movie, Tom had huffily complained on Twitter about a user who’d mentioned the Vichy government in WW2 France (or as Tom chose to put it, “Nazi collaborators”, although the person involved hadn’t mentioned the Nazis at all), as evidence of how awful “CyberNats” were.

That Harris then thought there was nothing odd, hypocritical or contradictory about creating and promoting a video in which Alex Salmond was directly and deliberately portrayed as the Nazi leader (and which, at the time of our writing this piece, Harris has not deleted from YouTube) reveals much about Labour’s inbred policy of double standards which has served the party so well of late.

This blog picked him up on it immediately (as you’ll see in the pic above), and tweeted our own thoughts on the subject, without claiming to be offended but noting the laughable hypocrisy. To be honest we sort of wish we hadn’t now, because it started the chain of events which led to Harris’ departure as Labour’s new-media guru, and as long as he was actively using Twitter in such a puerile manner, support for Scottish independence grew with every passing day. Sorry about that, fellow nationalists. And that’s an apology more sincere than anything you’ll ever get out of Tom Harris MP.

There's been so much happening lately that we can barely keep track of it, let alone attend to such trivial matters as real life as well, so let's see if we can get up to speed on the most interesting stuff quickly. It seems like everyone's talking about Scandinavia at the moment, as the SNP revealed that they're keen to see a future Scotland align itself in a slightly more Nordic way than a European one.

The Guardian, Caledonian Mercury and Scotsman have run a fascinating variety of perspectives on the issue lately, and this blog is certainly very comfortable with the idea that an independent Scotland might choose to run its society along such lines rather than follow the neo-liberal path that's done such a good job for Europe lately.

Hamish McDonnell's article in the CalMerc perceptively points out the conflict between the high-tax, high-quality lifestyle of the Scandinavian nations and the low-tax Ireland-style model the SNP have previously advocated, but Donald Adamson writing in Bella Caledonia comes in with a timely piece, ostensibly focusing on some election-result analysis but which ends by suggesting the SNP might stand to gain significantly by making exactly such a move towards the more social-democratic positions occupied by Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

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