Wings Over Scotland

Johann Lamont actually taught English, hard as that can be to believe sometimes. But for the sake of the children of Rothesay, Springburn and Castlemilk, we hope she was never asked to fill in on a Geography class, judging by this remarkable extract from her speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Dundee back in March:

“But let me tell you one phrase which really is meaningless. North of the border. And here is another one. South of the border. Because we have no border. We haven’t had one for three hundred years. We don’t need a border to be Scottish.”

You kinda do, Johann. How can you be Scottish if there’s no such thing as Scotland? And if there is, how do you know whether you’re in it or not, unless it’s got borders?

If there’s no border, how do we know whether a crime committed somewhere near Berwick comes under the jurisdiction of Scots law or English law? How do we know if the Scottish NHS or the English NHS is responsible for looking after the victim? And how do we know whether to charge the future lawyers who’ll fight the court case for their law degrees or not, if we don’t know which country their university’s in?

Okay, we know you’re working on that one.

While we’re not planning to shut Wings Over Scotland down during the festive break, obviously political stories are likely to be a bit thin on the ground with Parliament on recess and everyone plonked in front of Doctor Who full of turkey and booze. So to fill the gaps we’ll be resorting to some traditional methods – scattered in among new articles will be some end-of-year awards, best-ofs and perhaps the odd reprint of stories from earlier in the year when we had only a fraction of the readership we do now, and which most people therefore won’t have seen.

So let’s start with our favourite piece of terrier-like interrogation from the nation’s broadcast journalists, reporters and presenters. These are the people ultimately charged with holding our politicians to account on our behalf – literally so in the case of the BBC – so it’s vital they keep on top of their game with a firm grasp of the issues and an ability to cut through the waffle and obfuscation of their interview subjects and get to the heart of the matter.

So for a gem that dates way back to almost the first political programme of the year but which nobody managed to better for the entire 11-and-a-bit months that followed it, our first-ever “Wingy” goes to… Raymond Buchanan of BBC Scotland!

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The core claim of the No campaign, or “Better Together” as it prefers to be called, is that Scotland is economically, politically and socially stronger as a partner within the United Kingdom. This status is defined, according to the campaign’s website, by three key factors: Prosperity, Security and Interdependence.

Each deserves scrutiny, but for now let’s focus on the first one, with reference to Alistair Darling’s recent speech at the John P. Mackintosh lecture. This was the claim that Darling made on trade and business:

“Scotland is far better represented abroad as part of the UK than we could ever hope to be as a separate state. The nationalists tell you that the UK embassies and consulates do not represent Scots. Try telling that to Scots who find themselves in trouble in a far-flung part of the world and can rely on the UK embassy to help them out. To the businesses seeking trade. They open doors for our people and businesses across the globe.

Farmers, fishermen and women, businesses big and small all reap the benefits of the UK’s global reach and global influence. Losing this influence would be a massive loss. It would be impossible to replicate it on a smaller scale.”

I’ve worked in 27 countries around the world in all six inhabited continents, so I think it’s fair to call myself a global businessman. I’m operating in a medium-sized company, but in 11 years of travel I cannot bring to mind a single case where association with Britain has differentiated our business.

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When we wrote a story earlier today about another piece of embarrassing evidence falling off the Scottish Labour website, we thought it was nothing more than the latest in a long line of attempts by the party to clumsily cover its tracks over policy U-turns. But when we did a little digging, we found something altogether more interesting.

Because when we typed the page’s address into The Internet Wayback Machine for fun, we fully expected to find that the line about continuing free prescription charges had been deleted yesterday, or at least in the weeks since Johann Lamont made her infamous “something for nothing” speech.

Instead, however, TIWM listed only one previous version. While it’s not the sole factor, pages tend to show up on the archive site when they’ve been amended, and the only time the Wayback Machine had been called on to notice this particular page since its creation in November 2010 was on Friday the 6th of May 2011 – the day after the Scottish Parliament election delivered a historic landslide victory to the SNP, and an unprecedentedly humiliating defeat for Labour.

Results were still coming in on the 6th of May, but Scottish Labour had clearly already decided to eradicate mention of their promise to maintain free prescriptions. Now, it seems rather unlikely that the party convened a meeting of its executive committee, debated the policy, decided on a change and dutifully edited a page of its website while everyone was still digesting the scale of their defeat and/or catching up on some much-needed sleep after a long night of results.

(Indeed, it’s possible that the web page was changed even earlier than the 6th.)

The only reasonable conclusion it’s possible to draw, then, is that the policy was already internally a dead duck before election day. The party’s manifesto pledge (which can be found on page 41) that “with Scottish Labour, there will be no reintroduction of charges for prescriptions in Scotland” must therefore have been a deliberate and cynical lie, set to be abandoned even if the party won power.

It took almost 18 months from that day before Johann Lamont announced her “review” of policy to consider whether universal benefits like prescription charges would be retained under a future Labour government at Holyrood. The review isn’t due to publish its conclusions for almost two more years, and some prominent Labour MSPs have already suggested that free prescriptions will “probably need to stay” (despite the same member also describing them as a “right-wing policy”). But in the light of this evidence, we think it’s a reasonably safe bet what the final verdict will be.

Were readers to further conclude that it’s rather unwise – and perhaps even literally damaging to one’s health – to accept a word of anything Scottish Labour ever says at face value, we’d find it hard to disagree.

Yesterday we noted how Scottish Labour deleted evidence of an embarrassing policy U-turn from its website after it was highlighted by Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Questions. We suspected that it wouldn’t be the last example of the phenomenon, and sure enough we happened to stumble across this page earlier this morning.

It’s a press release from before the 2011 Holyrood election, by Scottish Labour’s shadow health minister and serial fibber Jackie Baillie. But we noticed something seemed to be missing from it that we were sure we remembered. So we went and checked out the same press release on Jackie Baillie’s own website. In the quote below, the sentence in bold is a line still visible on Baillie’s homepage, but which is oddly missing from the Scottish Labour version.

“The Tories’ solution is to increase prescription charges, putting an even greater burden on patients suffering from chronic illnesses. Their message is that if you are ill we will also make you poor. Labour is fully supportive of free prescriptions and will continue this policy if we are elected to Government next May.“

The text of the two releases is otherwise identical down to the last word. Just that one solitary line has unaccountably fallen off the page in the journey between sites. We don’t mind telling you, readers, we’re completely baffled.

There’s been much hot air unleashed in Holyrood in recent weeks over various “wastes” of money by the Scottish Government. First the opposition accused the SNP of spending £100,000 (which turned out to be a wild piece of back-of-a-fag-packet guesswork vastly overestimating the actual £4,000 cost) in fighting a Freedom Of Information request over EU legal advice. Then there were complaints about £48,000 spent sending a team to the premiere of Brave, despite the obvious benefits to be had marketing Scotland’s tourism industry on the back of the movie.

And finally, Labour in particular screamed themselves hoarse (and were still doing so as recently as yesterday’s FMQs) about the £470,000 the Scottish Government delegation to the Ryder Cup cost, even though it was a contractual obligation, encompassed numerous other business engagements which generated Scottish jobs, and in fact represented a 30% saving on comparable trips by the last Labour-led Holyrood administration. (Which weren’t contractual obligations.)

But still. If just for the sake of argument you were to accept the Unionist parties’ line, that’s a whopping £522,000 the Scottish Government has cavalierly thrown away in recent months. Meanwhile, how has the UK government in Westminster been doing?

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This was the “Education” page of the Scottish Labour website this morning:

After Alex Salmond referred to it at FMQs, the page has now been deftly amended to fall in line with the rest of party policy, as you can see in the image below:

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Okay, so here’s a fun teaser you can try out around the table after your Christmas dinner. What do the following far-flung countries have in common: Canada, Togo, Uzbekistan, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gabon, Panama, Zambia, Haiti, Libya and the Cape Verde Islands? Give up? Here’s a clue:

Yep – all of them, and 60 other nations too, are now officially better at football than Scotland. Entirely coincidentally, in the same week this dismaying fact was revealed, it was confirmed that former national coach Craig Levein was to sue the SFA for only offering to pay him £35,000 a month for the next year-and-a-half to sit around and scratch his arse in front of the Jeremy Kyle Show.

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We don’t often get to see Johann Lamont on the telly, so when she made one of her rare appearances in a five-minute interview with STV’s excellent Bernard Ponsonby this week we couldn’t only do half a job. As we’re still stuck in the house fighting off this year’s unusually-horrible and persistent germs – and as Lamont repeated most of the speech at today’s FMQs – we steeled ourselves, sat down with a large medicinal hot toddy and transcribed the rest of the piece.

What with it being Christmas and everything, though, you’re probably busy, so if you’re in a rush we’ve condensed all of Johann’s umming and aahing and stumbling and waffling down to its essence, where there is such a thing. The parts highlighted in red below are all you really need to read.

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21st November 2012

Dear Sir,

The Herald was the daily newspaper in our house when I was a child. My parents took both it and the Evening Times. When I started to outgrow the Bunty I eschewed the Jackie and its like and graduated straight to the newspapers. My father cancelled his Evening Times subscription when I was coming up to my Highers because he thought reading two newspapers every evening was interfering with my homework.

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We’ve spent the last 90 minutes watching an incredible video someone linked us to in a reader comment earlier today. It’s a public meeting of the Clydebank Trades Union Council on November 29th, headed by a panel comprising Gil Paterson (SNP MSP for Clydebank and Milngavie), Jackie Baillie (Labour MSP for Dumbarton), chairman Tom Paterson (secretary of Clydebank TUC), Stephen Boyd (assistant secretary of Scottish TUC) and Cathy Leach (Scottish Pensioners’ Forum).

Throughout the meeting the sense of anger and hurt coming from the traditionally-Labour audience and directed mostly at Baillie is overwhelming. Time and again the party’s betrayal of its core audience is bitterly attacked. But an hour and 25 seconds in, there’s a particularly remarkable exchange.

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To be honest, we’re still trying to work out what happened here. The Secretary of State for Scotland was well and truly slapped up and down the room yesterday by a panel of peers in the House Of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, every one of whom was a Unionist. One after another lined up to lambast the hapless minister with stinging attacks and rebukes in a session that caught most observers used to the Lords’ normal cosy atmosphere of mutual Nat-bashing completely unawares.

It seems far too late in the day for Westminster’s second chamber to present itself as the heroic defender of the people of Scotland. It would be much too ironic for the unelected Barons and Earls and whatnot to be doing it in the name of democracy. And there seems little chance this one-day aberration will suddenly convince anyone to buy the implausible notion that the Committee is an impartial investigator into the issues surrounding Scottish independence.

(The Herald reported proceedings almost word-for-word the same way STV did, under the headline “Michael Moore savaged by Unionist peers over EU row”, but the poor old Scotsman was so bewildered it couldn’t bring itself to mention Moore’s humiliation at all, glossing over the entire thing with a comically absurd assessment of how his evidence to the Committee “undermines one of the key claims of the SNP and Yes Scotland campaign over economic security for an independent Scotland”.)

So frankly, readers, your guess is as good as ours as to what the noble lords were up to. A momentary outbreak of conscience? One too many sherries at the office Christmas do? If you’ve got any suggestions, we’re all ears.