Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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