Wings Over Scotland

Sir Alex Ferguson (no relation) resigned as manager of Manchester United this week. The resulting deluge of newspaper articles covered a wide range of opinions, both gushingly complimentary and rather less so, but one characteristic of the man was uniformly (and approvingly) agreed on – that he always defended his players.

And it was hard not to contrast that unwavering loyalty (a trait described by Ferguson himself as “the anchor of my life”) with events in the independence debate last week.

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We got up late and we’re a bit bleary.

So here are some things to catch up on while we pull ourselves together, particularly for those of you still too scared of tractors and television sets to follow our Twitter feed.

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Somewhat to our surprise, the tabloid press at least hasn’t been able to avoid covering Labour activist, election candidate and BBC pundit Ian Smart’s astonishing brainfail outburst of Sunday night. (We’ve just noticed a Herald piece too, leaving – surprise! – the BBC and Scotsman as the only media not to consider it worthy of note.)

[EDIT 7pm: Scotsman now belatedly also covering.]

Smart himself has attempted a hasty damage limitation exercise, claiming that his comments, which presented Scotland as a nation of violent racist bigots suppressed from attacking minorities only by (relative) economic stability, were in fact directed solely at a small faction of independence-supporting “cybernats”.

But that isn’t true.

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Let’s imagine for a second, just for a bit of fun, that this was a prominent SNP or Yes Scotland activist, rather than a Labour one who’s the main contributor to LabourHame and regularly employed by the BBC for some cosy chat on the Sunday Politics.

Charles Green wasn’t using the P-word in a hateful or prejudiced way either, but he got slammed all over the media, chased out of his job and fined £2500. We’re guessing it’s a non-story here, though. Shall we all have a look at the papers tomorrow and find out?

But incredibly, the P-word isn’t even the most offensive thing.

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It’s gone midnight and we don’t normally do speculation, but as it’s already showing up in our incoming searches we’ve spent the last little while trying to work out what’s gone on between SNP MP Angus Robertson, Labour MP John Mann and the Herald in the last 24 hours. So first let’s establish the known facts, then have the attempted deduction, and hopefully by the morning read the official clarifications.

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We hope you’re just drunk, Ian. Honestly we do.

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Writing a site like this is in one sense an exercise in idealistic cognitive dissonance. No matter how often the opposite turns out to be the case, you always sort of hope, deep down, that if you highlight someone’s occasional failings in a calm and factual manner they’ll say “Oh well, that’s a fair cop”, and even if they don’t change their ways they’ll at least acknowledge the validity of legitimate, honest criticism.

But as we say, it rarely turns out that way. Last night we picked up on what was at heart a fairly minor semantic quibble with high-profile Scottish-politics commentator David Torrance, arising from the evening’s edition of Scotland Tonight. He got in touch with us on Twitter almost immediately to object in rather strong terms to our views, and an exchange went on until around 2am when everyone seemingly went to bed.

We thought no more of it, although we hoped this morning that there might be some answers to some questions that Mr Torrance had explicitly invited during the debate. Instead, to our surprise (we know, still) and dismay, not only were none to be found, but the entire discussion – at his end, anyway – had completely vanished.

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Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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Supporters of independence often level the accusation at Unionists that they think Scotland is “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to thrive on its own. Unionists generally affect great insult at the suggestion, and have taken to being much more circumspect about the first two, nowadays tending to claim that Scotland could survive without Westminster control, just that it shouldn’t, because of all the positive aspects of the Union such as [SUB FILL IN LATER PLEASE].

Accordingly, the “too wee, too poor” element of the argument against independence has taken something of a back seat in the last year or so, and the “too stupid” part has been correspondingly pushed to the foreground.

Firstly, we’re simply told that – for some reason – Scotland does better if all its big decisions are taken in London, leading inescapably to the conclusion that we’re not as bright as our betters to the south. But more crudely, we’re also shown on a regular basis just how bad independence could be.

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I sometimes worry about the leftward edge of the Yes Scotland coalition. My own politics are very much at that end of the spectrum, but a few times in recent months – most notably when the SNP changed its policy on NATO – I’ve been concerned about the campaign putting the cart before the horse. Some very angry commentary on the NATO issue appeared to imply that we might as well stay in the Union if an independent Scotland was going to sign up to the Alliance, petulantly throwing away all the other progress that independence would enable like a toddler in a huff.

The crucial thing to remember about the referendum is that the “downtrodden masses” are no longer the majority. The great triumph and great evil of Thatcherism, as practiced by both Tory and Labour governments over the last 30 years, was to deliberately and successfully marginalise the poor by bribing those just above them. Hard-pressed homeowners are understandably terrified of falling into the apocalyptic pit of misery that seethes just below them, and have been conditioned to view the poor below, not the rich above, as the greatest threat to their security.

Years and years of attack pieces in the right-wing press have created a culture where working-class people have been persuaded to hate “scroungers”, in the form of the unemployed, the sick, and the disabled rather than those who’ve actually bankrupted the country. The word “fairness” has been cynically inverted and perverted to depict the relatively well-off as victims and the poor as the greedy villains.

Poll after poll suggests support for independence is greatest among the poor, and weakest – rationally enough – among those who are doing best out of the status quo. But the poor alone are not great enough in number to win the referendum. If we unite around a “soak the rich” banner, and a vision of Scotland dictated by those who garner just a few percent of the vote between them in elections, we will enjoy a great feeling of moral superiority, and we will lose.

So I was a little nervous about the tenor and outcome of the “Radical Independence Conference” which took place in Glasgow this weekend.

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As you might expect, attendance at yesterday’s independence rally in Edinburgh has been the subject of much spin and counter-spin. The police, who have of course never knowingly overestimated the size of a march for any cause, put the crowd at 5000, a figure which the Unionist press has repeated as fact. The marchers themselves seem fairly united around an equally-predictably higher claim of 10,000.

Out at the extremes, a few exciteable nationalists somehow got it into their heads that the capacity of the Ross Bandstand auditorium was a frankly ambitious 12,500 while poor old mad Ian Smart of Labour suggested there were fewer people at the rally than St Mirren took to their game at Rugby Park, ie under 1000.

(Though he subsequently conceded that it might just have been as many as 2000, albeit while also asserting that we should expect significant SNP resignations in the next 48 hours as a result of something or other connected to the event.)

This excellent shot taken from Edinburgh Castle and sent to us by WingsLand reader Jean T should provide some sort of guide as to whose estimate is closer to the mark.

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Never slow to jump on a bandwagon, Wings Over Scotland would like to announce, after endless media speculation, a long-awaited rearrangement of our popular and much-used links column. We like to keep our blogroll relatively lean (with at most 20, 10 and 5 links per section), because when you link indiscriminately to everyone you might as well just have a single button that leads to Google. We also sigh when we see blogs linking to long-dead sites that haven’t been updated in months or years, or even ones that have been outright deleted. Quality, not quantity, is our benchmark.

Brand-new faces include National Collective (Scottish Politics) and Political Betting (UK Politics). Despite misgivings about the character of their proprietors in both cases, both are valuable and admirable resources. Our other debutant is Mark Steel, whose concise and biting satirical columns in the Independent rarely reference Scotland (and so find themselves in UK Politics), but are unmissable reading all the same for those troubled by the thought that the neoliberal consensus has consumed England entirely.

Returning from exile is Scotland’s finest newspaper journalist Iain Macwhirter (Scottish Politics), after a long period of silence saw his personal blog excised from the list. Lesley Riddoch has fallen by the wayside to make room, not due to any decrease in the merits of her postings but to a marked drop in their frequency, as well as the fact that they can almost all be read in the Scotsman anyway. (For similar ubiquitousness reasons, Gerry Hassan steps aside for the Jimmy Reid Foundation.) We prepare ourselves wearily for the imminent assault on our gender-balance shortcomings.

Meanwhile, in the customary shock promotion, an outbreak of considered and intelligent commentary sees Kevin McKenna elevated, for a probationary period, from Zany Comedy Relief to the Scottish Politics section. (We hope this recategorisation might also persuade Mr McKenna to desist from the “comedy” pieces he occasionally attempts. They are not, and let’s put this delicately, his strongest suit.)

Filling his place in the ranks of the Nutjob Squad is inevitably the increasingly-tragic figure of Ian Smart, for whose ability to function in society by the time the referendum comes round we seriously fear at the current rate of deterioration in his sanity.

We’re still actively seeking sites of considered and worthwhile Scottish debate from a Labour perspective – including Unionist ones – which might reach the same heights as the Tory-leaning Alex Massie in the Spectator (whose features, even when we fundamentally and vehemently disagree with their ideology and content, are almost always thoughtful and well-sourced), but the substantial percentage of previously-unrepresented Labour voters who do back the Yes campaign are now represented by Labour Voters For Independence (Scottish Politics). We’ve chosen their more active Facebook page over the actual website.

If you know of a regularly-updated site – of any political persuasion or none – of serious analysis and comment with regard to Scottish politics, that we’re not currently featuring and should be, let us know.