Wings Over Scotland

Julie McDowall’s splendid piece for this site on call centres yesterday is causing something of a stir in the medical community today – social media is alive with shocked and disgusted doctors horrified or disbelieving at the news that their trade union, the British Medical Association, outsources its legal-advice helpline to a Serco call-centre and misleads members about its nature.

For those questioning the veracity of the claims, some references follow.

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Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?

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Imagine working for a trade union; one which is formidable and respected, one forever being sought by Radio 4. An indomitable body of professionals who never resort to strikes and scuffles, braziers and megaphones, because they’re so heavy with influence and history that they need only tap the right minister on the shoulder to have their voice heard and heeded.

Imagine working for the magnificent British Medical Association.

When I saw the BMA were recruiting in Glasgow a few years ago I was delighted and surprised. My surprise increased when I was sent to a call centre for the interview. Sitting prim and nervous in the reception area, a tacky room with walls that trembled if you brushed against them, I wondered what this cheap and nasty office could possibly have to do with the great and august BMA.

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As you can probably imagine, with over 140,000 readers a month we get quite a lot of emails. Unfortunately the contact form plugin we’ve used until now to avoid being swamped in spam (which is what tends to happen if you just give out your direct email address) is a bit rubbish, and results in an inbox that looks like this:

Having 95% of your email listed as being from “Contact” or “Contact form” is, we can reveal, a major pain in the backside when it comes to keeping track of conversations.

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Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

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Actually, we hear this one was meant for internal use only.

We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:

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Oh dear lord. The No campaign really does seem hell-bent on making life hard for those of us who occasionally enjoy mocking it by (slightly) exaggerating the depths of its “Project Fear” scaremongering strategy. They’ve attempted to terrify Scots with uncertainty over the price of stamps, mobile-phone roaming charges and having to buy in Strictly Come Dancing, but none of it’s worked.

So now they’re pulling out the big guns: baked beans.

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Amount of money saved by Iain Duncan Smith’s “benefit cap” so far:

“Around £6 million”

Amount of money wasted on Universal Credit welfare reform so far:

£120 million (or £140m, or £200m, or £425m)

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The UK government – saving you money on welfare by 2034! (If you’re lucky.)

There’s quite an embarrassing subbing howler in a story in the Sunday Times today in which the word “No” is replaced by the word “Yes”, which you’d have to put down as a non-trivial error. Fortunately the meaning is clear from context, as it’s part of a piece called “No campaign is branded as ‘amateur'” and containing the following fairly indisputable quote in respect of “Better Together” and its director Blair McDougall:

“There is no one regarded as a grown up in that campaign team.”

The entire article – which is accompanied by another in the same paper entitled “Unionists’ front man is nobody’s Darling” – is well worth a read. You can find it below.

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We must confess ourselves perplexed by the Messianic awe in which much of the Scottish media appears to hold Douglas Alexander. The epitome of the modern career politician (as far as we’re aware he’s never had any sort of job outside politics), Alexander has risen without trace through the Labour ranks, and his Wikipedia profile is unable to attribute one noteworthy achievement to the former minister despite his having held some of the most senior offices of state.

We’re unable to recall a single instance of Alexander ever expressing a view on any subject that was anything other than 100% in line with the official orthodox party position, and in Scotland his name is perhaps most associated with the shambolic conduct of the 2007 Holyrood election.

Nevertheless, for some reason Scottish newspapers appear to regard him as some sort of intellectual powerhouse within Scottish Labour, and the fact that his speeches don’t consist exclusively of tangibly bitter, hate-filled attacks on the SNP also seems to have him marked down as the party’s great thinker.

Which means that roughly every two months we have to endure a vacuous torrent of middle-management duckspeak such as the one Scotland on Sunday has inexplicably chosen to make its front-page lead this morning.

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Whenever the hoary old story about passport checks along the border with England is dug up for another run-around (roughly once a month, as far as we can tell), the Schengen agreement usually features as the justification. Here’s a typical example:

“If an independent Scottish state were required to join the Schengen area as part of its EU membership, it would therefore have to implement the border and immigration policies required by the EU. As the UK has no intention of joining the Schengen area, this would involve border controls between Scotland and the continuing UK in order to meet EU rules protecting the security of the Schengen area.” (III 3.46)

And from there it’s only a small step for Project Fear to get to this:

“Joining Europe’s borderless Schengen area could open Scotland’s border up to mass immigration.”

This, as Theresa May knows full well, is utter rubbish. It relies, as so many of the No camp’s arguments do, on normal people’s lack of knowledge of obscure and complex laws (see also: the currency issue). So let’s cut through all the mumbo-jumbo and jargon and lay the plain and simple facts out for the record.

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