Wings Over Scotland

In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

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We’ve noted a few times on this site that if you can judge a person by the company they keep, then the “Better Together” campaign would be an unsavoury character indeed. Backed enthusiastically by the likes of UKIP, the EDL/SDL, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order, it must be an uncomfortable place for Lib Dems and self-professed “internationalist socialists” within Labour to be living.

By contrast, the blackest sheep in the Yes family are a tiny handful of anonymous internet McGlashan sorts, daft and sometimes shouty but plainly harmless. We can’t recall any examples of Yes supporters being caught out giving Nazi salutes or calling for the forced repatriation of immigrants or the murder of Catholics, and you can be sure if there were any they’d have been all over every newspaper in the land.

So there’s a degree of irony in the newest recruit to the Unionist cause.

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Willie Rennie made a bit of an idiot of himself last night. He appeared towards the end of the final instalment of Iain Macwhirter’s largely-excellent STV documentary “Road To Referendum”, with the empirically wrong assertion (in the name of the fabled “positive case for the Union”) that “the National Health Service is a United Kingdom institution, it was created by United Kingdom people.”

This, as alert Wings Over Scotland readers will know in some detail, isn’t true. The NHS has never been a “United Kingdom institution”. From the first day of its creation, it was two independent institutions – the Scottish NHS and the English/Welsh NHS.

(It’s now four separate national bodies – Northern Ireland having its own service, with a different name and different responsibilities, and the Welsh NHS having been “divorced” from the English one and devolved to the Assembly in 1999.)

To the Scottish Lib Dem leader’s embarrassment, the NHS therefore proves the exact opposite of what he’s trying to use it to prove – namely, it shows that Scotland can deliver better health services for its people (free prescriptions, personal care, eye tests, dental check-ups, hospital parking) via independence, yet still co-operate smoothly and productively with the rUK where necessary without the sky falling in.

But Rennie’s clanger triggered off another interesting exchange.

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The Scottish press has reacted in a fairly typical manner to the release yesterday of a Scottish Government-commissioned report on the implications of independence on welfare, which is to say by finding the most doom-laden interpretation of it possible.

Leading the charge is the Daily Record, with a piece that online goes by the relatively restrained headline “Undoing hated Con-Dem cuts could could put all benefit payments at risk, SNP are warned” (though the print version screams “SNP TOLD YOU CAN’T CUT TORY CUTS”). The Scotsman follows along with “SNP welfare plan ‘a risk’”.

Both, though, are telling a deeply – and obviously – misleading story.

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Below is attached the full text of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech in London today.

We’ve translated a few of the trickier passages for you.

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Particularly alert readers may recall a shock-horror story from the Scottish media earlier this year relating to a sharp rise in the number of people waiting over four hours for treatment in hospital A&E departments, which came complete with some dramatic (and highly misleading) graphs.

Labour’s ironic Scottish health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie poured opprobrium on the Scottish Government both for the figures and for changing the treatment-within-four-hours target from 98% to 95%, with the Tories enthusiastically joining in as usual.

So we were naturally quite curious to see what the corresponding figures for the English NHS would be, and they were finally released today.

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The Herald today reports officially (or at least semi-officially, quoting “a senior Treasury source”) what we’ve been telling you for months:

“Scotland’s annual block grant is set to be cut by hundreds of millions of pounds in a knock-on effect from George Osborne’s attempt to find £11.5 billion of extra savings across Whitehall budgets.”

The cuts will be implemented in 2015, if Scotland votes No to independence. Labour has repeatedly refused to commit itself to higher spending in the event it wins the 2015 election. The net effect on the Scottish budget of both up-front and hidden cuts like those described in the links above will be likely to run into billions of pounds.

When Johann Lamont says that universal services for Scots are no longer affordable, she isn’t basing her calculations on Scotland’s own finances, because Scotland can afford them and will be able to afford them for decades to come. She’s basing them on the reduced pocket money that Scotland will receive from Westminster regardless of who wins the next election, because that’s the true meaning of “One Nation Labour”.

If you like cuts, vote No for more. Lots more.

This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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The Scottish media is full today of Gordon Brown’s latest attempted intervention in the independence debate. Scotland on Sunday and the Sunday Herald both report that the former Prime Minister will urge Scots to “ditch the Tories, not the Union” (as the original SoS headline put it before being changed online to the rather more sober “Brown urges Scots not to give up on UK”, presumably out of respect for the gentle sensibilities of the paper’s Conservative-leaning readership).

(We’d like to take a brief moment here to appreciate a couple of beautifully acidic, deadpan lines from the Herald’s piece, written by Paul Hutcheon. Our emphasis.)

“Brown, who led his party to defeat at the last General Election, will be the special guest at an event in Glasgow. Although Labour has a dominant role in the cross-party Better Together campaign, senior party sources last year pushed for a separation to convey Labour’s distinctive message.”

The substance of Brown’s argument, in so far as it can be said to have any, is founded on a lie that was comprehensively disproved on this very website well over a year ago – namely that “if Scottish Labour supporters vote to leave the UK it would mean abandoning colleagues in England to years of Tory rule”.

That proposition is demonstrably untrue (not to mention a remarkably defeatist assertion that Labour can’t now defeat the Tories in England, despite having done so in 1997, 2001 and 2005). But even if it wasn’t, what then?

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We had to be out most of yesterday, so we didn’t have time to cover a story which broke in the morning in several UK papers. 24 hours later, though, we can still find no mention of it in the Scottish media, which remains fully occupied in filling its pages with recycled wittering drivel about the pound.

This is a worrying state of affairs, because yesterday’s story is of direct concern to an awful lot more Scots than a hypothetical scaremongering fantasy about currency.

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Johann Lamont, interviewed on the BBC last weekend:

“You can understand the desirability of people having access to medicines, but everybody knows there are tough choices being made now.” (10m 19s)

That’s the “leader of the Labour Party in Scotland”, there, seemingly equivocal on the principle of “people having access to medicines”. Nye Bevin must be proud.

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We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

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