Wings Over Scotland

Only the special ineptitude of the Scotsman could make the task of downloading a simple PDF into a near-impossible trial suitable for the Krypton Factor. We don’t advise you bother trying to get yourself a copy of “Scotland Decides” (the paper’s compilation of its eight-week series of pro- and anti-independence essays) from its own website unless you have a fetish for frustration, but thanks to the sterling efforts of Peter Bell we have a local copy here for you without all the dicking around.

The contents of the document, when all taken together, are revealing.

Read the rest of this entry →

Recent claims made by Jackie Baillie (Labour’s shadow health spokeswoman and Better Together campaign director) suggested that Scots would be unable to gain access post-independence to medical treatment in England, because a Yes vote would lead to cross-border reciprocal healthcare becoming bogged down by red tape, complexity and costs, leading to treatment being delayed or withheld.

As we’ve explained before, given that reciprocal agreements already exist between the UK and other countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) – in the form of the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) – Baillie’s claim is at its most generous interpretation an absurdly ill-informed misunderstanding, and in a more depressingly plausible scenario, an outright lie.

Read the rest of this entry →

The media (and some of the more gullible elements of the blogosphere) recently got itself into a lather about Douglas Alexander’s latest contribution to the independence debate – excellently rebutted by novellist and playwright Alan Bissett – which presented his vision of a post-referendum Scotland that voted No to independence.

Here’s an alternative picture. But unlike the typical “Better Together” scare story, these are not fabricated fantasies. Many are happening right now, while others are merely under discussion and in preparation.

This is what you’re voting for if you vote No.

Read the rest of this entry →

The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

Read the rest of this entry →

Bless ’em, they’re getting closer. After some nagging, the Herald has now finally changed the story about jobs at Faslane that it printed a correction for earlier this week. And credit to them, the new version is a good 5% less wrong than the original.

Rather more distressingly, though, the newly-edited story still doesn’t match up even to the Herald’s own correction, never mind any kind of reality.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s an absolutely despicable article on Labour Uncut today that we’re reluctant to link to. There’s a Google Cache version here, and in case it dies we’ve reprinted the whole thing below (sue us, Labour Uncut) so you don’t need to give the site traffic.

For the most part it’s a tedious rehash of the tired old “votes for 80 million expat and diaspora Scots” routine, but it’s enlivened with some ugly, base abuse of the First Minister, or “the fat, failed economist from Hollyrood” [sic] as author and Labour member Ian Stewart refers to him. The worst part, though, comes just before the end.

“At a time when the French voters of London have their own seat in the National Assembly, when serious moves are being made to press for a similar accommodation in the Irish Republic, not to mention Sinn Feinn’s mooting of some kind of a say for the wider diaspora, what do we get? Oh yes, the chance to maybe need a passport to visit granny.

Perhaps Mr Salmond made his attitude clear to these millions when he organised the great “Homecoming 2009” a while back – when it was clear to all that if your accent was in English rather than American, you had best not bother.”

This, we feel wholly confident in asserting, is a defamatory and libellous statement. The notion that Alex Salmond ever suggested, let alone made it “clear to all”, that English people weren’t welcome at Homecoming 2009 is one utterly unsupported in fact, and a normally-respectable site like Labour Uncut should be ashamed to have printed an open and direct accusation that the First Minister is a racist.

The battle over independence will get ugly in the next 18 months. We hope the Yes side doesn’t descend to the depths of Mr Stewart, and that the aggressive provocation of the Unionists doesn’t lead to the spilling of blood in Scotland as it continues to do in Northern Ireland. If it does, forgiveness will be a long time coming.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of our very favourite No-campaign scare stories of the year was the Huffington Post’s “Vote Yes And You’ll Die Of Cancer”. But if Scotland chooses independence in 2014, will it actually affect our healthcare? After all, we’ve already noted how NHS Scotland has been independent since inception (and why we need a Yes vote in order to provide it with a stable funding base that won’t be cut out from under it via the effect of Barnett consequentials under Westminster austerity).

But it’s also worth examining how it would work in practice. What about if we travel to the rUK or in Europe? What about the cross-border co-operation that currently characterises the relationship between the UK’s two health services? Would we still be able to be treated in an English hospital if we vote for independence? Let’s find out.

Read the rest of this entry →

Johann Lamont actually taught English, hard as that can be to believe sometimes. But for the sake of the children of Rothesay, Springburn and Castlemilk, we hope she was never asked to fill in on a Geography class, judging by this remarkable extract from her speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Dundee back in March:

“But let me tell you one phrase which really is meaningless. North of the border. And here is another one. South of the border. Because we have no border. We haven’t had one for three hundred years. We don’t need a border to be Scottish.”

You kinda do, Johann. How can you be Scottish if there’s no such thing as Scotland? And if there is, how do you know whether you’re in it or not, unless it’s got borders?

If there’s no border, how do we know whether a crime committed somewhere near Berwick comes under the jurisdiction of Scots law or English law? How do we know if the Scottish NHS or the English NHS is responsible for looking after the victim? And how do we know whether to charge the future lawyers who’ll fight the court case for their law degrees or not, if we don’t know which country their university’s in?

Okay, we know you’re working on that one.

We’ve added a couple of new sites to the UK Politics section of our links column. The Green Benches is a resource we’ve kept an eye on for a few months now, and while its direct relevance to Scotland is quite small, its informed insider view of the true havoc being wreaked on the National Health Service in England and Wales is a warning of what we can expect in the future should we choose to remain in One Nation Britain and let any of the London parties take control of Holyrood.

The Void is a site we’ve been reading for even longer, and fulfils a similar purpose to The Green Benches, except covering welfare reform rather than NHS reform. The language can be a little adult, but the level of hard data is phenomenal, reporting things that never get near the mainstream media. With welfare still reserved to Westminster, there’s stuff in here you simply have to know if you are, or might one day become, or know anyone who is, unemployed, low-paid or sick.

Check them both out. Don’t have anything breakable to hand.

Labour today is a far cry from the party of old, a party that was set up to provide a voice for the working class so as to gain control over the means of production for the masses rather than to be dictated to by capitalism. The modern incarnation is now peddling the notion of “One Nation Labour”, with Johann Lamont decrying what she calls the “something for nothing country” of Scotland, presumably referring to the stubborn preference of the Scots for the social democractic principles of “old” Labour over the neoliberal New Labour. As justification for the rightward shift, Lamont asserts:

“If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.”

(Clearly she’s been using Gordon Brown’s sub-editor.)

On the face of it, that seems a relatively straightforward statement of fact: if you can’t pay for something then you have to cut back, go without or find new money to properly fund it. It should be noted that as we’ve seen, at present there’s no need to make this choice because current spending is fully funded. However, as costs rise and privatisation, budget cuts and PFI in England (along with some creative accounting of England-only spending as “UK” projects or reserve-budget items) continue to cause reductions in the Scottish block grant, we soon will.

Read the rest of this entry →

Gordon Brown doesn’t turn up in the House Of Commons very much. He’s represented his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituents at just 14% of votes since stepping down as Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, not bothering to voice an opinion on their behalf at 545 out of 635 divisions. But at least we’ve now found out why.

Brown has barely signed in to earn his £200,000-a-year salary for the last 30 months because he’s been busy working on a list of 22 questions to ask the SNP. We can tell he’s devoted his time to it single-handedly, because the list – unveiled at a speech in his constituency yesterday – has clearly never been anywhere near a sub-editor. It’s a clunking, bloated lump of leaden prose, almost entirely bereft of punch, coherence and even basic readability – any primary-school English teacher worth their salt would hold the former Prime Minister back for some extra lessons on first glance.

Nevertheless, because we’re professionals we’ve ploughed through the double negatives, split infinitives and stultifying repetition to make some sort of sense of it, and in the interests of opening up debate we’ve come up with answers to all of Gordon’s queries, even though we’re not actually in the SNP. Read on below.

Read the rest of this entry →