Wings Over Scotland

When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.

When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.

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Part 1: Scottish Labour – yes, Scottish Labour – have a go at another party for (get this) an insufficiently prominent leader. No, we’re not making that up. The party led by Johann Lamont just slagged someone off for not being seen in public enough. It’s possibly the first time they’ve ever accused Alex Salmond of underpromoting himself.

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We must admit, we’re baffled by the Daily Mail’s sudden and extraordinary attack on Ralph Miliband, the long-dead father of Ed and David. If there’s any publication on Earth you’d think WOULDN’T feel on very solid ground lecturing other people on stuff they said in the 1930s and 1940s, you might imagine the Daily Mail would be it.

We can’t for the life of us work out what the right-wing hatezine thinks it could possibly have to gain from such a hysterical, vile assault, which even most Conservatives are disassociating themselves from in embarrassment.

The current Labour leader has often spoken of his rejection of his father’s strong left-wing views (indeed, he does so in the rebuttal the Mail has, albeit with the greatest of ill-grace, published today), so goodness knows what the paper is trying to achieve.

Other than, perhaps, to tempt Labour into displays of gross hypocrisy.

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Oh, what the heck, let’s do all of it.

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(No. 3246 in a long and continuing series.)

The “Better Together” campaign director has a lengthy piece on the right-wing Labour “Progress Online” website today, which we won’t trouble ourselves with the usual disingenuous content of. We’re not even going to challenge the comical assertion that “recent polls show that support for independence currently stands at just one in four”, because if you’re selective enough it IS possible to find outliers with wildly flawed methodology producing that sort of number.

There was one claim we WOULD like to clarify, though.

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This seems to count as a pretty big landmark.

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Sorry, folks. We haven’t quite managed to get going today. We’ve got a cold, the weather’s grey and miserable, and watching the TV feels like being stuck in a bad dream you can’t wake up from, as the Tories look for new ways to be evil and Labour’s response isn’t to condemn their grotesque, neo-feudal plans for the people of Britain, but to say “Hey, you’re stealing our ideas!”

(The ever-delightful Liam Byrne, there, apparently totally unashamed to say that “this announcement is little more than reheating of a Labour scheme – ‘Work for your Benefits’ – which the Tories scrapped when they came into power”.)

Beset by this avalanche of vile, spiteful idiocy (all of which was allowed to pass unchallenged by a subservient BBC), our germ-weakened mind has reeled like a punch-drunk boxer. But we’re not yet quite so addled and bewildered that the likes of Ruth Davidson can get anything past us.

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This man only controls the finances of Scotland because Scotland is part of the UK.

Never forget that if you listen to Labour and vote No next September, there’s (at least) a 60% chance that he’ll control the finances of Scotland until 2020. Ready to risk it?

The strain of keeping up a three-year campaign of fearmongering and bile is starting to tell on the stout media defenders of the Union. This week the Telegraph’s blustering “Scottish Editor” Alan Cochrane flopped out a particularly limp effort on the subject of the scare du jour, an independent Scotland’s defence.

Never one to shy away from the sort of hyperbole you’d normally associate with some anonymous Twitter loony, Cochrane leapt straight in by dismissing the SNP’s proposals for Scottish defence as “the most ludicrous of all” of their policies, rating them 11 out of 10 for madness. But it was his attempts to put some numerical meat on the bones of this bold assertion that showed up just how lazy the Unionist narrative of Scottish inadequacy has become.

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Nice of them to lay this on today.

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As far back as I can recall, I haven’t believed in anything.

I’ve had no over-riding passion for change, I’ve felt jaded and disconnected from the establishment, from the institutions. Westminster and the political scene of the UK was framed by a “they’re all the same” mentality. All I saw was greed and corruption in people who didn’t represent my view of the world, but that’s just how it is, right? It’ll always be the same, we can’t change it.

But maybe we can.

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