Wings Over Scotland

Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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One of our very favourite No-campaign scare stories of the year was the Huffington Post’s “Vote Yes And You’ll Die Of Cancer”. But if Scotland chooses independence in 2014, will it actually affect our healthcare? After all, we’ve already noted how NHS Scotland has been independent since inception (and why we need a Yes vote in order to provide it with a stable funding base that won’t be cut out from under it via the effect of Barnett consequentials under Westminster austerity).

But it’s also worth examining how it would work in practice. What about if we travel to the rUK or in Europe? What about the cross-border co-operation that currently characterises the relationship between the UK’s two health services? Would we still be able to be treated in an English hospital if we vote for independence? Let’s find out.

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With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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In a year characterised by a marked increase in heat, as the Holyrood opposition focused its efforts almost exclusively on personal attacks against SNP ministers in an attempt to decapitate the Yes campaign, very few things could be said to have united a wide spectrum of the political sphere, from the radical arch-left to soft nationalists and Labour traditionalists alike. But a speech in September saw almost the entire Scottish media and blogosphere react with one astonished, horrified voice.

You don’t need us to tell you which one, do you?

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We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange back in May with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green quasi-leader Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with all our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the full he-said-we-said (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation culminated in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, independence and the SNP are of course not interchangeable terms. Something like a third of SNP voters don’t back the policy, and the Greens and SSP are also in favour, as are various percentages of those who vote for the three London parties. And one of the loudest calls from the non-SNP sections of the independence movement has been that those in favour should formulate a constitution for the prospective nation in advance of the referendum, which could then form the basis of what people voted on, avoiding the danger of the referendum being seen as a party-political issue.

(Which is what the Unionist side desperately wants to make it, hence their strategy of trying to personally discredit the SNP leadership in recent months.)

The whole point of independence is indeed to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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Disappointingly, since we examined the state of censorship in Scottish political blogs back in April, the situation has only got worse. Even those sites which previously sat atop the table for freedom of debate have gone backwards – Bella Caledonia now snootily demands a WordPress login before it’ll deign to allow you to comment without days in the moderation queue, and Lallands Peat Worrier has tragically fallen foul of the dreaded Curse Of Captcha – while many of the others have tightened their grip even further over the year, allowing only the most anodyne of opinions to be aired.

Our award for Moderator Of The Year, though, goes not to obvious suspects like Better Nation or Labour Hame (RIP). While both still reject wholly inoffensive comments by the bucketload lest they cause their delicate readers to faint at the prospect of civil disagreement (and the former now closes comments on stories as soon as three or four days after publishing them), at least within a few days the “offending” item tends to be deleted altogether so that the would-be commenter knows where they stand.

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Merry Christmas, readers. We hope you have one filled with peace and love. There are still at least two-and-a-half years of Tory-led Westminster government to come.

If you need the words, they’re below.

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Fewer than one in ten of our readers follow us on Twitter, which is a bit annoying as it’s a great way of passing on interesting stuff quickly without having to put together a whole post on it. (We don’t really understand people’s objections to using Twitter. Some say it’s full of daft trivia about what celebrities had for their tea and suchlike, but that’s only true if you choose to follow those people. There’s no law that says you have to follow 1000 folk, you can follow just one if you like.)

Anyway, the point is that while everyone on Twitter is talking about it, if you aren’t you might well not have come across this piece by baby-faced left-wing wunderkind Owen Jones for the Independent yet. Called “The Strange Death Of Labour Scotland” (in a nod to Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw’s recent book of the same title), it doesn’t contain much we haven’t been saying here for the last year. But it’s always interesting to see the English left slowly starting to notice what’s going on in North Britain. Their assessment is rarely kind, and currently readers are approving of Jones’ analysis by a margin of around 15 to 1. It’s well worth a read.

Last week, unnoticed by the media, the “Better Together” website issued a rather disturbing “Activist Briefing”. It was based around what’s been a core facet of the anti-independence campaign for years – the notion that even with oil revenues, Scotland is too poor to go it alone. (Despite regular assurances to the contrary in more recent times, this is still a fundamental belief of the No camp.)

The alarming passage was this one:

“Even with a generous allocation of Scotland’s oil revenues (a geographical share) the best estimate is that in 2011-12 Scotland was running at a significant deficit. Assuming a geographical share of oil revenues – which would in no way be guaranteed – Scotland would have run at a significant deficit in each of the last ten years.”

The two troubling aspects of the quote above are pretty obvious. Firstly, the notion of Scotland receiving its clear rights under international law is described as “generous”, as if it was somehow in the gift of the UK to decide where Scotland’s maritime borders lay in the event of a Yes vote. But much more worrying is the second part, which reaffirms the assertion that such a share “would in no way be guaranteed”.

Any attempt by the rUK to annexe internationally-recognised Scottish resources after independence would be quite simply an act of war, and as such can be discounted as belonging to the realm of fantasy. But what such comments do point to is a mindset and possible strategy that’s barely any less discomforting.

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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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