Wings Over Scotland

The raison d’être of a government is to act in the interests of their populace, yet there’s a widespread perception that they instead now exist solely to serve the political and corporate elite, sometimes with not even lip service paid to the wishes of the public.

It’s a perception backed up by hard fact in the form of opinion polls, which demonstrate that the clearly-expressed desires of the electorate are regularly ignored by all parties in favour of blind ideology, cuts to services the public value, and tax breaks for those who don’t need them.

Whoever’s in power, the assets of the nation are sold off against the will of the people, in the name of a private-sector market ideology, for the short-term profit of wealthy City speculators, and for the benefit of other countries who ironically often end up running British industries as (foreign) state-owned public enterprises.

This happens because the votes of most of the electorate don’t count for anything.

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Sometimes I can be a deeply cynical man. I get it from a couple of sources. Some is from my time as a political activist, when I learned the game in the sewer of Glasgow politics. Some is from my media degree, which taught me (to paraphrase the song) to believe none of what you hear and less than half of what your read. An education heavy on sociology, history and psychology helps too.

I didn’t grow up with this view of the world. I came to it, over time, and much careful consideration. Yet at heart I remain a socialist, and I believe that people are inherently good. It’s the systems we build for ourselves that skew the perspective, that bend our good intentions out of shape, that make us less than what we should be.

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Knock yourselves out, folks. But keep it clean, okay? We had a big dinner.

From the defence white paper “Defence Industrial Strategy”, published in 2005 by the Labour government of Tony Blair. “Onshore” in this context means “in the UK”.

“Shipbuilding and integration: there is no absolute requirement to build all warships and Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels onshore, but a minimum ability to build and integrate complex ships in the UK must be retained.

B2.24 There is no requirement for fabrication of basic structures in the UK per se; however, mounting military operations from the UK base (including the fit of specific equipment for the operation in question), requires the relevant facilities and skills to be available onshore.”

Just out of curiosity, can anyone tell us when those policies changed?

We’ve had a go at this subject once before, but this time we’ve come up with a less hyperbolic analogy. It was sparked by another Twitter comment from Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, which cropped up last night in the middle of some truly abject cringing from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall.

.@bobby_mckail@Dungarbhan@blairmcdougall@Jenemm3 My country is Scotland.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) November 7, 2013

We couldn’t help but note the use of the singular.

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Here’s Johann Lamont at FMQs yesterday:

“Let me repeat: the United Kingdom Government has made it clear that defence contracts will not be let outside the United Kingdom and therefore will not come to Scotland if Scotland were outside the United Kingdom.”

And here’s the UK’s Defence Secretary Philip Hammond speaking on Channel 4 News the previous night. See how clear you think he makes that.

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We’ve only just realised that it’s our official second birthday today. (The technical one, ie when the site went live as a test with some old imported content, was last Friday, but we forgot to mark it, and today in 2011 is the day we published the first-ever post written specifically for Wings Over Scotland.)

In those two years we’ve published 1,680 posts including this one, and the thick end of a million words – 941,426 to be exact – by over 40 different authors. It’s a lot of stuff to take in, especially if you’re fairly new here. (Which you quite probably are, as nearly half of our 100,000+ readers have arrived in the last three months.)

So to mark the anniversary, we thought we’d see if we could distil most of what we’ve written in those 24 months down to just two iron rules, one for each year – in effect, producing a sort of user’s guide to the Scottish and UK media on the subject of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish independence.

We think we’ve managed it.

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We were hoping to come up with a subtler headline than that, but trying to analyse today’s media in fine detail is a bit like trying to translate a complex scientific report from Mandarin into Latin, when it’s taped onto the front of a locomotive that’s hurtling directly towards you at 125mph and you’re standing on the track with a telescope.

There’s horror as far as the eye can see on this morning’s newsstands, but the most despicable and inexcusable is the atrocity of a front page disfiguring the Daily Record. The cover of “Scotland’s Champion” is crammed with falsehoods and idiocy from top to bottom, but that’s not the half of it.

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We’ve been scratching our heads a bit throughout the developing story of BAE’s job cuts in Portsmouth, Glasgow and Rosyth. Not least because it seems Scots are meant to be grateful that the Govan and Scotstoun yards have been “saved”, despite the reality being a huge slice of the workforce being made redundant.

(Curiously, not one story that we’ve been able to find mentions how many are actually employed at the two Clyde docks. We had to go back to 2010 to find out that it’s apparently 4000, meaning that the cuts will be slashing 20% of the yards’ manpower.)

But the strangest thing is something else.

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It’s bleakly appropriate that we found ourselves having this conversation with the former Labour spin doctor and now BBC political pundit John McTernan on the day that BAE announced almost 1800 job losses.

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“Hi there,” writes an alert and cheery reader this afternoon, “I work for ******* within an RBS contract and so have my own RBS PC log-in and security card. During lunch today, I tried to take a look at the website for the Yes Campaign.”

Well, that’s understandable, we suppose.

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This was Glasgow South West MP Ian Davidson speaking (around 5:40) on Scotland Tonight just over a week ago, in a debate about independence and left-wing values sparked by the findings of a poll commissioned by this very website.

His contention was that independence wasn’t necessary to achieve left-wing goals:

“I used to be a councillor in Strathclyde. In many ways Strathclyde was actually far more radical than the Scottish Government has ever been. We had clear policies to combat deprivation – there was an emphasis on pre-fives, there was an emphasis on tackling poverty and misery and class differences in education that no Scottish Government has replicated.”

When we heard that, we went and checked some dates.

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