Wings Over Scotland

It’s going to be tough to hold our heads up abroad if Scotland actually democratically votes not to take responsibility for its own affairs like any normal grown-up country.

In any vaguely self-respecting world, a No vote would be accompanied by the immediate disbandment of the Scottish national football and rugby teams, because we’d have declared ourselves not to be a nation. But either way, hopefully we won’t have to face scenes of opposing fans telling us to man up again after 2014.

Readers will probably barely recall a story from back in January, because it only made the front page of almost every Scottish newspaper and the lead item on most Scottish political TV and radio programmes. It was a Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report which put support for independence – via an extremely old and outdated question formulation – at a dramatic low of 23%.

Almost as forgotten was the “Better Together” campaign’s half-hearted attempt at capitalising on the numbers, by misrepresenting them as meaning something else entirely in order to create a misleading graph. (Perhaps because by now we’re so used to them being somewhat creative with numbers that nobody noticed.)

So it’s only to be expected that the latest poll numbers from the same source, released yesterday, don’t seem to have made any of today’s papers or broadcasts.

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Labour Party member Cailean Gallagher in the Herald, 7th June 2013:

“Until this week, the hope was that a Labour government at Westminster would respond with a cure. Now Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have disclosed Labour’s response to austerity: more austerity. No use sitting tight and hoping for change at Westminster – even with Labour we get a party in thrall to austerity.

So people realise austerity is not just a Tory policy, but an inevitability of the Westminster system. Alternating Labour and Tory governments at Westminster are not a route out of austerity. After 13 years of Labour, Britain is the fourth most unequal country in the developed world. It is on course to being the most unequal.”

In a post earlier this morning we made passing reference to the Scottish “cringe” – a sociological phenomenon by which Scots develop a subservient inferiority complex about their culture and abilities, predominantly compared to England. It’s not something we’ve ever suffered from personally, but every once and a while its malevolent force can still be felt nagging at the corner of even the strongest psyche.

An illustrative example was provided by an interview that Liam Byrne, the Labour spokesman for work and pensions, gave to Radio 4’s “Today” programme yesterday on the subject of the party’s proposed reforms to social security should it somehow win the 2015 UK general election.

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We had a wee fond chuckle to ourselves this morning when we woke up at some ridiculously ungodly hour and saw the front page of the Scotsman.

Not, you understand, at the thought of millions of Scottish people getting cancer, and certainly not at the Duke of Edinburgh being admitted to hospital, but rather at the staunchly-Unionist paper inexplicably missing a chance to add the words “after independence” or “under SNP” to the headline, as would be its more common practice.

But then we read the actual article.

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ANDREW NEIL, 5-6-2013: Would you keep child benefit for better-off taxpayers?

MARGARET CURRAN: Well, what we are saying, and Ed will make his own speech tomorrow, and I don’t have foresight of that… What we are saying is when you get into government, and when we come in in 2015, we won’t be able to do all that we wanted to do… Will child benefit for the wealthiest people be our top priority? I’m not sure about that.

ED MILIBAND, 6-6-2013: When it comes to the decisions of the next Labour government it won’t be our biggest priority to overturn the decisions this government has made on taking child benefit away from families earning over £50,000 a year.

We must admit, for someone who hasn’t seen the speech it’s a heck of a guess. Does anyone want to ask Ms Curran if she’s got a score forecast for Croatia vs Scotland?

Below is attached the full text of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech in London today.

We’ve translated a few of the trickier passages for you.

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It seems worth updating this piece from last September, for the 40,000 of you who weren’t around then. Today, Labour leader Ed Miliband gave a speech on his party’s welfare plans should it win the 2015 UK general election. It contained the following line:

“People’s faith in the system has been shaken by a system that appears to give a minority of people something for nothing.”

If you think you’ve heard those words before, let us refresh your memory.

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One of the odder quirks about the BBC iPlayer is that it’ll let you rewind live TV broadcasts for up to two hours, but not radio, despite radio using vastly less bandwidth. So at the moment we can’t bring you a verified quote that Liam Byrne really just told Radio 4’s Today programme that the idea of rent controls as a solution to the UK’s housing benefit bill was “going a bit too far”.

But there’s another new Labour welfare policy that’s missing a fairly vital chunk of information this morning, which is even more worrying than the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions having less intelligence, insight, principle and moral courage than a starving weasel.

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Heaven’s sent us an angel, folks. Alert reader Jack Deeth is stranded far from home shores (really very far indeed) and stuck for something to do in the long winter nights, he very generously offered us his transcribing services.

We leapt on the offer with undignified haste, and you can read the first results below, in the shape of today’s interview between Margaret Curran and Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics, in which the shadow Scottish Secretary clearly and unambiguously laid out a future Labour government’s spending and welfare plans.

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Please don’t make us transcribe this nine-minute trainwreck of an interview with Margaret Curran on the subject of Labour’s welfare and spending plans, from this afternoon’s edition of BBC2’s Daily Politics. We don’t know if we could take it.

Click the image to listen, if you have a high pain threshold.

Along with more direct, overt scaremongering, it’s probably fair to say that the core theme of the “Better Together” anti-independence campaign to date has been “uncertainty”. Day after day sees the media and public assailed with neurotic demands for definitive answers about every conceivable aspect of an independent Scotland that in most cases couldn’t be answered by any nation on Earth, including the UK.

The No camp disastrously overplayed its hand with the “500 questions” fiasco, which saw it subjected to literally worldwide mockery, but it suffered an arguably even more wounding blow today with the release of some figures which blew gaping holes into pretty much everything it’s spent the last 18 months saying.

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