Wings Over Scotland

As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

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When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

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We like to jest at some of the more hysterical and ridiculous scare stories put out by Unionists about independence, but sometimes the joke just isn’t funny any more.

This week we listened to the “For A’That” podcast, which featured a range of bloggers including the pro-indy Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell and the rare beast that is a right-wing Green, in the form of new member and Liberal Democrat defector Douglas McLellan, once seen many moons ago around these here parts.

The last guest was ultra-loyal Lib Dem activist Caron Lindsay (above), tireless defender of Willie Rennie and front-bench policy in general. She provided much of the heat in the otherwise good-natured discussion, with a succession of furious tirades against the SNP, including several (eg on the “unanswered questions” about pensions in an independent Scotland) which could in fact have been easily cleared up with a few minutes’ use of the Wings Over Scotland search box.

One in particular, though, stood out as perhaps an all-time low for the No camp.

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On the rare occasions when we write something about football, and the Old Firm in particular, we always get a few angry comments from people complaining that it’s got nothing to do with politics and therefore has no business on an independence website. We trust this will put a stop to that argument once and for all.

The story is nonsense, of course, and it’s no great surprise that the original Sunday People piece doesn’t name its supposed sources. But the mere fact of the notion being aired in the UK press at all is pretty strong evidence that we’re not the only people who understand the connection between Scottish sport and Scottish politics.

We can’t claim credit for the idea. We just thought it needed doing a bit better.

We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

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We haven’t had one of these for a wee while, but what better way to welcome back a popular feature strand than with a particularly splendid Unionist Of The Day, found for us by an alert reader in today’s Scottish Sunday Express?

The scary thing is, it’s barely any more mental than the article.

After six years in kneejerk opposition, extending even so far as to abstain on or vote against budgets with their own amendments in them, Scottish Labour have apparently suddenly discovered the merits of mature, constructive consensus politics. This week has seen the party calling for unity in opposing the bedroom tax, and demanding that the Scottish Government should mitigate the effect on social-housing tenants by providing tens of millions of pounds from its own budget to bridge the gap.

There are numerous reasons why this isn’t a practical long-term solution, some of which we explore in the comments on this Labour activist’s blog post. But if anyone should be wondering why it might also seem politically unattractive to the SNP, perhaps it might be instructive to note what Labour’s reaction was when the Nats did that very thing a year ago, when finance secretary John Swinney found £40m to lessen the effects of UK government cuts forcing the poorest to contribute more Council Tax.

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It’s hardly a new phenomenon. But poor old Tom Harris just can’t stop fibbing:

Ian Davidson, as we’ve already noted, was in fact absent from BOTH votes on the bedroom tax. (Tom Harris missed the February division for personal reasons, but 214 of Labour’s 258 MPs evidently didn’t consider it “meaningless”, turning up to vote in favour of the opposition motion put forward by the SNP and Plaid Cymru.)

If you click this link, you’ll see some footage of the Labour MP for Glasgow South West, Ian Davidson, at today’s protest against the bedroom tax. The unnamed person with the camera approaches him and confronts him with a direct question.

There seems to be some doubt with regard to the veracity of the answer.

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There’s an isolated outbreak of proper journalism in the Herald today. A story by actual reporter Gerry Braiden (who must be relieved to have it offsetting a ridiculous puff piece about a 1p cut in beer duty prompting a crazed drinking bonanza in Scottish pubs over the Easter break) reveals that the head of Scotland’s largest police authority has been accused of the repeated harassment of a married woman.

“Phil Braat, chairman of the Strathclyde Police Authority, is the subject of complaints made to the force by a woman employee of a Glasgow City Council-related company last December.

The Herald understands that, despite the complaint being made almost four months ago, Mr Braat, a Labour councillor in Glasgow and a solicitor, has not been interviewed by the police regarding the accusations.”

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this perplexing mystery, we’ve added some emphasis to the quote above. For some reason we can’t seem to get a celebrated segment of an old TV chat show out of our minds.