Wings Over Scotland

We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.

Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.

We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:

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It’s hardly a new phenomenon. But poor old Tom Harris just can’t stop fibbing:

Ian Davidson, as we’ve already noted, was in fact absent from BOTH votes on the bedroom tax. (Tom Harris missed the February division for personal reasons, but 214 of Labour’s 258 MPs evidently didn’t consider it “meaningless”, turning up to vote in favour of the opposition motion put forward by the SNP and Plaid Cymru.)

When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

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Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

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I’ve been a nationalist pretty much all my life, or at least since I was old enough to grasp the basic concept of politics (probably from about the age of 10 or so). Leaving aside any precocious notions of specific policies, I’ve never been able to grasp the basic concept of a people who consider themselves to be a nation being afraid to actually stand up and take responsibility for running that nation themselves.

If you think you’re a country, you shouldn’t be having foreigners pick your government for you. And if you don’t, you need to accept that you’re just a region with ideas above its station, and act accordingly – no more “national” football teams, no rugby teams, no flags, no anthems, no different laws or any of the rest of it.

To me, the idea goes far beyond anything so base as cowardice, and belongs instead in the realm of “simply too mad to understand”. It’s like not believing in gravity or evolution or the Earth being round and orbiting the Sun – that is, once someone’s pointed it out to you, it’s just a bit mental to keep disputing it.

Nobody can have two countries, or at least not simultaneously. You can be a citizen of somewhere, carry a passport for it, live there for as long as you like, or whatever else, but countries are like wives and livers – you can only have one at a time. You can change your nationality, if that’s what’s in your heart, but not have two at once. I’ve only agreed with Norman Tebbit about one thing in my entire life, and it’s that.

I’m Scottish. I’m British too, just like I’m from West Lothian and from Europe and from the Northern Hemisphere and plenty more things, but only one of them is my country. As such, I believe that it’s a self-evident truth that the government of Scotland should be chosen by the people of Scotland, and the people of Scotland alone.

But occasionally, just very occasionally, I have the misfortune to witness something like BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last night, and I’m not so sure we can be trusted.

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When we started a politics website, we invested in the best equipment money could buy, because we knew we’d need to guard against double standards ourselves as well as measuring them in others. The Super HypocrisOMeter 5000 is an industrial-strength device, built to cope with the most extreme manifestations of a trait that is the stock-in-trade of all politicians. But this morning we switched it on and tried to run Labour’s reaction to a story in today’s Express through it, and look what happened:

Let’s be clear. We’re not especially fussed about the comments themselves. We’ve figuratively wished a few people dead in our time, and as we’ve recently noted, at the end of the day it’s just words on the internet. We’re deeply dismayed at the growing phenomenon where people can be prosecuted, fired from their job, or even threatened with prison just for saying unpleasant stuff that plainly isn’t meant in any threatening sense. Salmond Senior’s own admirable response strikes the perfect note of disdain.

We’re not even going to attempt to whip up any outrage about the fact that the Labour member in question chose to attack Alex Salmond’s 90-year-old father rather than the First Minister himself – that’s pathetic and despicable, rather than hypocritical. Nope, the thing that catastrophically overloaded the triple-locked shielding and emergency cutout protection of the Super HypocrisOMeter 5000 was Labour’s astonishing attempt to half-heartedly distance the party from the comments. As well as blithely and shamefully trying to insist that Mr Kelly’s views reflected a “substantive issue”, Labour’s unnamed spokesman offered the following high-handed dismissal:

“This desperate smear campaign falls at the first hurdle because this Facebook page is not owned, managed, or operated by Scottish Labour, and it will not detract from the rantings and ravings of SNP candidates – sacked or otherwise – online.

“Political parties are responsible for their candidates and officials, but members of the public must be responsible for their own behaviour.”

Those readers whose minds haven’t just boggled all the way into unconsciousness will very likely be struggling to reconcile this statement with Labour’s previous views on online extremism, at least when it’s practiced by the infamous “cybernats“:

“Mr Gray made a strongly worded attack on what he calls ‘vile cybernats’ during his final Scottish Labour conference speech. And today Mr Gray writes in The Scotsman that he has discovered ‘at least one post suggesting that a particular journalist should be shot’.

Mr Gray also accused the SNP leadership of a “tolerance of this culture”. He also said that all voters ‘should be worried’ by internet postings from some SNP supporters, who he says are ‘poisoning the vital debate we now face’ on Scotland’s future. There is also a claim from Mr Gray, who stands down as leader on 17 December, that the SNP internet posters are ‘undermining the decency of the country’.“

Iain Gray has, of course, been far from alone among senior Labour figures in insisting that the “cybernats” – a disparate group of largely-anonymous individuals, of whom all, some or none might actually be SNP members – operate under the explicit instruction and control of the SNP leadership:

“Labour’s Anas Sarwar said: “Everyone knows that Alex Salmond desperately wants a second question on the ballot and now he has left the door open for his army of cybernats to deliver the response he wants.”“

Ever since 2011, Labour and its tame media have ramped up the angle that the SNP leadership must “do something about the cybernats“. Prominent features are headlined with pious pleas or strident demands for the SNP to condemn their nefarious activities, even as elected Labour MPs, MSPs and councillors (rather than random internet users) freely compare Alex Salmond to Hitler, Robert Mugabe or Slobodan Milosevic or call SNP politicians and members ‘traitors” without the hysterical press opprobrium which accompanies “cybernats” doing the same thing.

The Facebook group on which Alex Salmond’s father was wished dead was not an open group populated by any old internet loonies who wandered along. It’s closed to the public and the controlled, vetted membership of 533 includes the Scottish party’s foremost and finest – as well as current “leader” Johann Lamont and her “deputy” Anas Sarwar along with Shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran, former First Minister Jack McConnell, MPs Cathy Jamieson, Ian Davidson, Eric Joyce, Sarah Boyack, Tom Harris, Tom Greatrex and Tom Watson, and front-bench MSPs Jackie Baillie, Ken Macintosh and James Kelly, are all members.

(Most of the prominent online Labour activists whose names our readers will recognise also belong to the group, including John Ruddy, Aidan Skinner, Duncan Hothersall and Cllr Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher. Only the lovely Terry Kelly is unaccountably missing.)

We don’t think it’s dreadfully unreasonable to suggest that with a membership list like that, Scottish Labour has a lot more control and responsibility over what’s posted on the group than the SNP does over random anonymous Twitter users or comment-thread posters. In a world where suggesting that certain actions of rival politicians might be “anti-Scottish” generates hundreds of column inches and loud demands for resignation, we look forward to the blanket media coverage demanding that the leadership takes urgent action against this vile cyberBrit menace nestling in the very bosom of Scottish Labour. We’re certain it’ll be along any minute now.

The nationalist blogosphere is alive this weekend with talk of the recent BBC briefing at which several senior figures addressed an audience of the Corporation’s up-and-coming young journalists. The consensus view is that the recordings of the seminar reveal the BBC’s ingrained anti-independence bias – and indeed they do just that. But they do so in a way that’s both much less obvious and far more fundamental than most of the SNP supporters who’ve commented on them would have you believe.

You can watch the entire compiled recording above (the four individual sections with no syncing issues can be found here) and make your own mind up about what it demonstrates. But as our interpretation is rather at odds with that of most nationalists we’ve seen, we’re going to humbly offer it up for your consideration too.

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I've been watching the Labour Party's slow self-destruction for some years now with a mixture of regret and relief. Regret in what has become of a once great party, and relief that the Frankenstein’s monster it became may be slayed. This article will be rather critical of Labour, indeed it is more of a lament about Lamont and her ilk, but it is deserved. How did the party get to a point where its leadership has become so dysfunctional that they've turned former voters – myself included – away in droves?

I'm one of the lucky ones. As a supporter of independence I can envisage a future where the parties of old are reborn from the flames of destruction like a phoenix, without any Westminster baggage dragging them down. But that future is post-independence and until then the final death throes of the corruption eating away at the party are a danger to its prosperous future in an independent Scotland.

It is for this reason that I have been looking at most probably the greatest example of dysfunctional leadership in modern history, but one in which the participants learned and adapted to prosper later, a trick Labour could do with learning.

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Attentive viewers will recall this blog’s investigative journalism of last month, when we went searching for Scotland’s most prominent missing person – Scottish Labour’s alleged leader Johann Lamont. We were so concerned about her sudden dramatic disappearance from the nation’s airwaves shortly after her election that we were prompted to start an ongoing daily log of all political appearances on the Scottish media, which a couple of you have even very kindly been helping us to maintain.

With the Scottish Parliament in recess for Easter and the first quarter of 2012 just over, it seemed a good time to take a look at the old scoreboard, and as for the results… well, you’ll have had bigger surprises, let’s put it like that.

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If you’re a bit naive, it can be hard to understand why the parties of the Union are so bitterly opposed to a second question on the referendum ballot. All three of them, after all, claim to want more powers for Scotland (though not yet, and they don’t want to tell us which ones), and after all the fuss they’ve made before it seems odd that they don’t feel the need to get any democratic mandate for them.

It’s also odd because it’s pretty much agreed by everyone on all sides that a second question for, let’s call it Devo-X, would all but completely sink the SNP’s chances of winning a Yes to full independence, whereas in a straight two-way face-off it’s already very close and the numbers (as well as the arguments) are slowly but steadily moving in the Nats’ direction. That appears an awfully big gamble for the No parties to take purely in order to deny the SNP something (more powers, but short of independence) that all the Unionists are supposedly in favour of.

So what’s the real reason? Well, it’s not too hard to figure out.

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Something’s been puzzling us recently. So far as we can tell, every political party in Scotland now supports the transfer of more powers to the Scottish Parliament. The SNP clearly does, but all of the opposition parties are also now insisting that they want to improve the devolved settlement over and above the limp Scotland Bill currently staggering its way through Westminster.

We know the Lib Dems in both Holyrood and Westminster are in favour of more powers, because no less a figure than the Scottish Secretary told us so:

“The alternative is not the status quo, it’s actually about deciding what other powers Scotland should have within the UK.“

We had confirmation yesterday that Labour in the UK (along with Scottish Labour) also want more than the status quo, in the words of Alastair Darling:

“I don’t think that anybody would argue that the status quo, what we have at the moment, is satisfactory. The settlement reached in 1998 is not what we want at the moment, we need to move on from that.“

And of course, for the Tories, the Prime Minister himself has made his position clear (albeit that he had to humiliate the leader of the Scottish Conservatives to do it):

“And let me say something else about devolution. This doesn’t have to be the end of the road. When the referendum on independence is over, I am open to looking at how the devolved settlement can be improved. And yes, that means considering what further powers could be devolved.“

So that’s all just grand. We have that rarest of political beasts, a true cross-party consensus: everyone (except poor Ruth Davidson, who we suspect is in the process of urgently revising her opinion) agrees that the Scottish Government should have more powers. But what we don’t understand is why these powers are all conditional on a No vote in the independence referendum.

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