Wings Over Scotland

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.

Supporters of independence often level the accusation at Unionists that they think Scotland is “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to thrive on its own. Unionists generally affect great insult at the suggestion, and have taken to being much more circumspect about the first two, nowadays tending to claim that Scotland could survive without Westminster control, just that it shouldn’t, because of all the positive aspects of the Union such as [SUB FILL IN LATER PLEASE].

Accordingly, the “too wee, too poor” element of the argument against independence has taken something of a back seat in the last year or so, and the “too stupid” part has been correspondingly pushed to the foreground.

Firstly, we’re simply told that – for some reason – Scotland does better if all its big decisions are taken in London, leading inescapably to the conclusion that we’re not as bright as our betters to the south. But more crudely, we’re also shown on a regular basis just how bad independence could be.

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We’ve added a couple of new sites to the UK Politics section of our links column. The Green Benches is a resource we’ve kept an eye on for a few months now, and while its direct relevance to Scotland is quite small, its informed insider view of the true havoc being wreaked on the National Health Service in England and Wales is a warning of what we can expect in the future should we choose to remain in One Nation Britain and let any of the London parties take control of Holyrood.

The Void is a site we’ve been reading for even longer, and fulfils a similar purpose to The Green Benches, except covering welfare reform rather than NHS reform. The language can be a little adult, but the level of hard data is phenomenal, reporting things that never get near the mainstream media. With welfare still reserved to Westminster, there’s stuff in here you simply have to know if you are, or might one day become, or know anyone who is, unemployed, low-paid or sick.

Check them both out. Don’t have anything breakable to hand.

As Johann Lamont celebrated her first year as Scottish Labour “leader” by signalling the party’s intent to abandon the principle of free university tuition today, Nick Clegg completed the Lib Dems’ own sellout to Tory values with a despicable speech promising to back the Conservatives’ plans for welfare reform. The narrative was set earlier this month by the Chancellor, who justified the government’s proposed real-terms benefits cuts with a carefully-prepared line:

“We have to acknowledge that over the last five years those on out of work benefits have seen their incomes rise twice as fast as those in work. With pay restraint in businesses and government, average earnings have risen by around 10% since 2007. Out of work benefits have gone up by around 20%. That’s not fair to working people who pay the taxes that fund them.”

Terrible, isn’t it? Hard workers paying to lose ground to those layabout skivers who watch Jeremy Kyle all day. But let’s leave aside for a moment the issue that with an average of 23 applicants per vacancy (and sometimes far more), the huge majority of unemployed people are in fact desperate to find work, not lazy spongers. Let’s instead just take a simple look at what those figures mean in real life.

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Nick Clegg completed the Lib Dems' sellout today with a despicable speech promising to back the Conservatives' plans for welfare reform. The narrative was set earlier this month by the Chancellor, who justified the government's proposed real-terms benefits cuts with a carefully-prepared line:

"We have to acknowledge that over the last five years those on out of work benefits have seen their incomes rise twice as fast as those in work. With pay restraint in businesses and government, average earnings have risen by around 10% since 2007. Out of work benefits have gone up by around 20%. That's not fair to working people who pay the taxes that fund them."

Terrible, isn't it? Hard workers paying to lose ground to those layabout skivers who watch Jeremy Kyle all day. But let's leave aside for a moment the issue that with an average of 23 applicants per vacancy (and sometimes far more), the huge majority of unemployed people are in fact desperate to find work, not lazy spongers. Let's instead just take a simple look at what those figures mean in real life.

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Nick Clegg’s speech on demonising and punishing the poor and sick (in which he displayed a heroic willingness to take one for the coalition team by declaring “the Liberal Democrats are now the party of welfare reform”) brought the issue of the “something for nothing” culture back to the forefront today.

Scots, of course, are already familiar with the leader of the Holyrood opposition standing up and angrily telling the chamber how unsustainable and morally wrong it is that well-off people such as herself are entitled to universal benefits at state expense.

Yet numerous reports emphasise that universality is a solution that’s practical as well as desirable, because it’s economically efficient as well as solving the problem of people suffering because they’re unable or unwilling to claim benefits they need and ultimately costing the state far more money in remedial care.

It’s a tricky old pickle and no mistake. So entirely free of charge, we’ve had a wee think and come up with a policy that squares the circle, so that Johann Lamont can offer to solve the problem without condemning hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Scots (and Labour MSPs) to lives of unending misery.

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about the implications of independence for Scotland and its membership of the EU. As we’ve noted this week, the SNP has long acknowledged that the Scottish government would have to renegotiate terms of EU membership, but it’s highly unlikely that the EU would move to expel Scotland from the EU given the interaction between Scotland and the continent in goods, services, finances and people. As John Swinney recently noted:

“Scotland would not be applying for membership. Scotland is already a member of the European Union, our citizens are EU citizens today, we follow all of the EU relevant provisions that we are required to follow.

“So the key point is any negotiation would be taking place not to apply for membership, but for membership from within the European Union, which is the key distinction which has to be remembered in this debate.

“What we have always accepted is there has to be a negotiation about the detail and the terms of Scotland’s membership of the European Union, but crucially that will be taking place at a time when we are still part of the United Kingdom, still part of the European Union, of which we have been members for 40 years.

But if, just for the sake of argument Scotland was declared a new state and somehow cast out of this expansionist community, would it be the end? By being declared a brand-new nation Scotland would inherit all of the fixed assets and natural resources within our internationally-recognised borders, but none of the obligations of the old state – like a share of the national debt or being bound by international treaties.

Tempting, no? Sure, it would be awkward for a while, what with having to negotiate new treaties and being known as the only country in European history that the EU didn’t want in it, but there are alternatives to the EU.

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Contrary to what might sometimes seem to be the case, we don’t much like attacking the Scottish media, particularly the self-styled “quality” end of the market. Any good democracy needs a free press to function, and with newspaper sales in freefall the economic model for proper investigative and analytical journalism faces the biggest challenge in its history. We criticise the press not because we want to destroy it, but because we want it to live, and more importantly to be worthy of that life.

There is much to cherish in the pages of the Herald and the Scotsman, even if some of it (including but not limited to Iain Macwhirter and Ian Bell in the Herald, and Ewan Crawford and George Kerevan in the Scotsman) is used to provide a figleaf of balance behind which the papers can hide their bias. But it’s impossible for the publications in question to credibly protest that bias in the light of weeks like the past one, when the Scottish and UK press has united around a campaign of what cannot be reasonably described as anything other than concerted, co-ordinated lying.

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