Wings Over Scotland

We’re over the worst of the flu now, readers. You can blow out those prayer candles. Sadly, though, we’re still not quite at 100% fighting fitness, so it might be a wee bit too dangerous to wade recklessly into the pool of shrieking, panicked insanity that poor Brian Wilson is thrashing around in at the Scotsman today.

If you perhaps weren’t yet certain of the power of Nicola Sturgeon’s tremendous and widely-lauded keynote speech at Strathclyde University on Monday, Wilson’s furiously incoherent and plainly terrified response is the proof of the pudding. The No camp is losing the argument, and they don’t know what to do about it.

We’re not about to help them out with strategy tips as to the right way to make their case, but out of basic human decency we’ll give them one clue: this isn’t it.

We had a brief but enjoyable Twitter debate (Twebate? Twiscussion? Twargument?) with the Spectator’s excellent Alex Massie earlier today, on the question of whether it’s possible for a person to genuinely belong to two countries at once. Our view has long been that it isn’t, but Massie seemed incredulous, querying whether Sir Walter Scott and Donald Dewar really didn’t see Scotland as a “proper” country.

We’ve long pondered over the simplest analogy to explain our view, and for want of a better alternative (plus we still have the flu) reluctantly went down the war route.

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[FOOTBALL KLAXON.]

Okay, this has gone on long enough. We’ve been trying for quite a few months now to get anyone to explain something to us, and nobody ever has an answer. We’ve sat and watched with our heads in our hands as the SPL and SFL have competed to come up with the most bonkers, convoluted proposals for the reconstruction of Scottish football.

The SPL want two leagues of 12 splitting into three leagues of eight then merging back into two leagues of 12 again at the end, plus a league of 18 that just bumbles along feeling a bit left out of all the splitting fun. The SFL counters with a bizarre 16-10-16 (or possibly 16-10-18) system that has nowhere near enough fixtures in it, but proposes to fill the gaps with playoffs and by padding out the least popular competition in the Scottish game – the League Cup.

And all the while everyone pointedly ignores the most successful league system ever created in Scotland, which by coincidence was also the least embarrassingly stupid one, and which never ended with the team in 8th place in the final table having more points than the team in 5th place while all the other leagues laughed at us.

Please, for the love of God, someone tell us why.

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Perhaps the paper was confused after watching yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show, on which the host asked the question (at 37m) “Are you in favour of a squeeze on welfare?”, to which the allegedly-Labour politician Mr Balls replied “Of course!”

(Balls subsequently tried to waffle his way out of the response by claiming that he’d reduce the welfare bill by creating jobs, but Marr had expressly asked whether he backed the specific cuts to in-work benefits in the current welfare reform bill, and despite his repeating the question several times Balls refused to give an answer.)

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This last week has seen the publication of a report that saw the NHS in Scotland deliver its “best performance ever”. The NHS Scotland Chief Executive’s Annual Report 2010/11 was full of praise for the organisation and the efforts it has made to improve safety, service and value in times of dwindling budgets.

“Few issues are as important to us as our health and the quality of the health services we receive. When we come into contact with the health service, we want to know that we are receiving the best possible care – care that is compassionate and safe, delivered by the most competent practitioners and planned with us at the very heart of the decisions about our care. We want to have confidence in the quality and effectiveness of any treatment.

“Some of the most significant improvements in quality include the achievement of the shortest ever waiting times for outpatient and inpatient appointments, including progress towards achieving a maximum wait of 18 weeks between referral and treatment, significant reductions in Healthcare Associated Infection to the lowest levels ever recorded and other measurable improvements in safety in hospitals.

There have been impressive increases in the numbers of people accessing smoking cessation and alcohol brief intervention services, increases in the proportion of older people being supported to stay at home through improvements in services for those with long term conditions, and reductions in the need for people to stay overnight in hospital for treatment or procedures.”

The findings were reported in the national news in a generally positive manner, such as this BBC article published on the 24th of November, detailing the efforts of the management and staff in Scotland and the results they’d managed to achieve.

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Unionist Collective. Radical Unionist Conference. Women For The Union. March & Rally for Scotland in the Union. Scottish Unionist Convention. That’s a list of things you probably won’t see appearing between now and 2014, and with good reason. In fact, the thought of such groups starting up seems inherently preposterous. But why?

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Despite slightly fewer posts last month than the preceding one, Wings Over Scotland still entered its second year by hitting another new all-time pageviews record in November, with an increase of nearly 25,000 to 429,114. The more telling statistic, though, was the number of unique users, which rocketed by a whopping 24% as almost 5000 new people came to visit, bringing total readership past 23,000.

(We were going to stop doing these every month, but with December’s figures likely to take a fall due to the Christmas break, we hope you’ll forgive us one more moment of self-congratulatory horn-tooting while we’re still on the upslope.)

It also seems a good time to remind you that we’re always on the lookout for features to draw even more readers in. In 2013 we’d like to broaden our contributor pool a bit and add some more names to the excellent talent we’ve already been proud to showcase. 2012 has seen a dozen people other than myself notching at least one WingsLand byline, and we want lots more voices next year. If you’ve got something to say and you want tens of thousands of people to hear it, you know where to reach us.

A few months ago, lots of people in the Glasgow area were wondering how the city’s Labour party was going to be able to fund some of the lavish promises in its council-election manifesto, such as free wi-fi covering the entire city. Thanks to the intrepid journalism of local freesheet The Glaswegian, the answers are beginning to emerge.

“Thousands of elderly people could be forced to give up safety alarms after the introduction of charges. Glasgow City Council will next month introduce a £3-a-week charge for the community alarm telecare service.

The council’s arms-length service provider Cordia say that around seven per cent of the 13,500 users – 945 – have indicated they no longer want the service due to cost. But opposition councillors say they have been told up to 3000 will give up the alarm.”

Here at Wings Over Scotland, we say good riddance to the despicable something-for-nothing scroungers demanding that ordinary taxpayers fund the emergency service that could be the difference between their life and death. We only hope that Labour will increase the charges as time goes on, because otherwise snatching £3 a week from 10,000 vulnerable old folk will still take over three years to produce the £5m that the council is contributing towards a “regeneration” project intended to restore the “lost grandeur” of the street directly outside its imposing city chambers.

But enough about Labour. UKIP also put in some strong performances in the three Westminster polls last night, scoring two second-place finishes and one third place on a night when the Lib Dems sank to an astonishing EIGHTH and the BNP outpolled the Tories in the same Rotherham seat. The truly disturbing thing, though – speaking as a current resident of England – was the total absence of a single viable party of the left.

The turnout in all three elections was dismal, with two of them barely scraping past the 25% mark and the most popular just managing to get a third of voters out. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least a significant part of the reason for that may be the near-total lack of meaningful choice available.

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Analysis later. If you simply want to read the two passages of the Leveson Inquiry’s report which concern the actions of the First Minister without wading through 2000 or so pages, you’ll find them below. Bored readers may wish to compare the contents with our own assessment/predictions from five months ago. (NOTE: Where it says “emphasis added”, the emphasis in question was added by Lord Leveson, not by us.)

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The Scottish media is winding itself up for another sustained assault on the Scottish Government. Kerry Gill of the Scottish Daily Express has been pushing the story hard since last night along with some journalists from other English papers, and the BBC’s Scotland correspondent James Cook set the scene in a tweet this morning:

Sure enough, the Scotsman carried it as a front-page lead below only the Leveson Inquiry report – while inflating the figure by over £31,000 for effect – and the Herald also carries a prominent piece, although at least only rounding the amount up by £1,420.

The reports reveal that 36 people spent around a week in the US, taking part in various business events in addition to attending the golf tournament, which the Scottish Government was contractually obliged to send a delegation to as part of the agreement to host it at Gleneagles in 2014, and which is predicted to be worth £100 million to the Scottish economy. But as the papers line up to hand the Holyrood opposition a club to hit the First Minister with over the spending, there’s a very significant part of the equation missing from the coverage.

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It was reported in the Scotsman on Wednesday that the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus had raised doubts over whether an independent Scotland could successfully keep using Sterling, because when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993 it took only 38 days for the currency union to split.

His views led to a rush of comments from supporters of the UK union arguing that a currency union is only possible with political union. Then a spokesman from the Treasury asserted that protectionism grew between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic after the split.

The evidence cited by the Treasury spokesman was the fall in Slovak exports to the Czech Republic from 42% of all exports to 13% between 1993 and 2003. Conversely, Czech Republic exports to the Slovak Republic fell from 22% of total exports to 8%. He noted ominously that currently 59% of Scottish exports are to the rest of the UK.

While the basic facts cited are correct, the interpretations put on them by Vaclav Klaus and the UK Treasury spokesman are, shall we say, at odds with the truth.

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