Wings Over Scotland

Alex Salmond, rumoured to have a fiery temper, must be hopping mad today. Johann Lamont wasted her time on a speculative exercise at First Minister’s Questions, aiming (as is her wont) for nothing more than a petty point of snark, and instead a clumsy piece of SNP briefing allowed her to extract an embarrassing retraction and apology to the chamber, which the Unionist press has of course seized on gleefully.

(The Scotsman has emblazoned no fewer than THREE links to the same article across this morning’s front page to make sure none of its remaining readers miss it. The Herald, meanwhile, had Magnus Gardham write a frothing piece entitled “Salmond apologises for misleading MSPs at Holyrood”, only to bizarrely pull it – and all its comments – and replace it with an almost-identical one in order to change the headline to “Salmond says sorry for misleading MSPs again“. The original has been deleted from the Herald’s search facility, but can still be found on the server.)

In fact, rather than being increased by 0.18% as Salmond claimed at FMQs, the budget for Further Education colleges has been reduced by 1.7%. Given the austerity measures being inflicted on the Scottish Government by Westminster, that’s actually a near-miraculous protection of funding, particularly given the other investments being made in education, and a properly-briefed Salmond could have calmly and effectively pointed that out. He might also have noted that Lamont had no genuine interest in FE funding and nothing constructive to say on the subject – such as where Labour would make the savings necessary to maintain/increase it.

The Labour “leader” sought only to make party-political hay out of semantics, at Mike Russell’s expense, to give her hapless back-benchers something to cheer, but in her flailing landed herself an unexpected hit on the First Minister himself. Someone somewhere in a dark corner of SNP headquarters will be nursing a severely chewed ear this morning, and deservedly so.

Labour, meanwhile, will crow delightedly about the Nats’ own-goal. But at the end of the day, we suspect the electorate will remember who it is who wants to impose crippling tuition fees on students, and who wants to end free personal care and bus travel for the elderly, and free prescriptions for the sick, and increase Council Tax, and use the money to pay for nuclear weapons so that Westminster politicians can strut around on the world stage. We know we will.

It’s hard for any remotely aware and rational person not to be a misanthrope. If you can watch the news for any extended period of time and not come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole would be greatly served by a bird-flu pandemic or alien invasion, you’re a better person than we are (which is very likely the case anyway).

But even by our low expectations of humanity, it’s been a bad couple of weeks.

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Well, it’s all been a pretty confusing business in Scottish football this week, with the SFL or SFA or B&Q or someone releasing some rather vague documents with baffling talk of “Hotspots” and no mention of half the things that people had been trailing (like Celtic and The Rangers “colt” teams, which is a dynamic, thrusting new way of saying “reserves” that someone’s apparently just invented) and whether the new leagues would have splits or would prefer an Orange Maid.

However, to keep our readers as immaculately informed as they’re used to, we’ve been digging deep and speaking to all the right people, and we think we’ve finally managed to definitively figure out the complete plans. They’re actually reasonably easy to follow as long as you concentrate, so take a deep breath and jump in.

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Below is a picture of the headline and opening paragraph of a David Maddox-penned story that appeared on the Scotsman website last night.

It is, as you can see, an essentially positive story, noting that independence per se represents no threat to RBS staying in Scotland. Those readers wondering if that was perhaps a little at odds with the Scotsman’s normal editorial position on the issue would be reassured, then, to see how the story looks this afternoon.

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As attentive readers will know, I currently live in the leafy Georgian city of Bath. Just a few miles down the road is a small town called Frome, where interesting things have been happening over the last 18 months or so. Today’s edition of the Independent has a pretty decent one-stop guide to them, which is well worth a read in full.

By way of a trailer, though, we’ll pick out a few soundbite snippets for you.

“united in being fed up with their town council’s institutional wrangling and party-political self-interest”

“set about making their town a better place to live”

“it’s the people who live in Frome that know what’s best for the area”

“hostility, stonewalling and outright non-cooperation from the established parties”

“an incredible 75% increase in voter turnout”

“In Westminster… elected officials toe their party line and avoid contentious issues; maintaining the status quo to the detriment of progressive debate… always eager to discredit their opponents, but much more reticent when it comes to their own ideas… the sole aim of the main political parties is not public service, but to get power, and once they have it to cling on at all costs“

“In contrast to this partisan deadlock, the [Frome] councilors are proud to point out that… they have not yet once failed to reach a democratic consensus on any issue.”

Running your own affairs sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

We try not to get angry about stuff on this site. It’s nearly always more constructive to keep a detached outlook – whenever Anas Sarwar or Johann Lamont or Ken Macintosh come out with some new outrageous or offensive lie or smear against the independence movement, say, a calm head dispassionately detailing the reality is more useful than a foul-mouthed rant. But today we’re finding it hard to keep a lid on our emotions, and it’s not even anything to do with politics.

The Herald reports this morning that Craig Levein has initiated legal action against the SFA over the terms of his sacking as Scotland manager. Those terms, if you weren’t aware, are that Levein gets paid £35,000 a month for the next 20 months, a sum for which he is required to do no work whatsoever.

Levein’s complaint, according to the Herald, is that he isn’t being paid off in a single lump sum, which would then enable him to pocket £700,000 for being the worst national coach in Scotland’s history and then take up a lucrative new job with anyone stupid enough to employ him. Under the current arrangement, the SFA could cease paying his monthly £35K if he took a new position elsewhere, potentially saving the cash-strapped association a useful amount of cash.

Viewers, we’re almost shaking with rage as we type this. £35,000 a month is a borderline-obscene salary anyway (it’s more than three times what the First Minister gets for running the entire country). For someone who was absolutely appalling at their job it’s doubly scandalous. But for doing nothing at all it’s a jackpot for which Craig Levein should be spending every waking hour on his knees thanking the gods.

Craig, though, wants more. Craig wants to pocket £35,000 a month from the SFA for nothing AND grab anything else he can get his hands on. (Because, y’know, in these austere times it’s hard to scrape by on only £1,167 a day.) Where he should be pathetically grateful to the SFA for just firing him rather than hurling him off the top of the North Stand at Hampden for what he did to our national team, he’s bitching that he’s being somehow wronged by getting the annual salary of 26 nurses for sitting around on his useless arse watching Jeremy Kyle for the next year and a half. Instead, incredibly, he wants to suck even MORE money out of Scottish football in one of its most diffcult hours by engaging the SFA in a costly legal case.

We… we’re going to stop now before we say something that gets us in trouble.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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A press release on the always-positive Scottish Labour website this morning blares a wake-up call to the reckless and irresponsible Scottish Government. “IPPR Report Shows SNP Economic Policy Is Financially Illiterate”, it rages, going on to quote the party’s finance spokesman Ken Macintosh:

“This report shows that the SNP’s economic policy is financially illiterate. Not only do we get more spending than we raise as a result of being in the Union, but the SNP’s commitment to turn Scotland into a low-tax corner of Europe would see revenues plummet and public spending slashed to the bone. Scotland would be crippled by what could only be described as economic suicide.”

Oof. Strong words for sure. Hang on, though – which SNP economic policy are we actually talking about here? The preamble to Macintosh’s furious blast references “the SNP’s plans to cut Corporation Tax to 12.5%”. But the only problem with that is that the SNP doesn’t appear to have any such plans.

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While conducting an imaginary debate with myself in the mirror (not a euphemism), I struck upon an idea that I think is worth trying out on people who claim to be undecided about the referendum. You know the type – they ask you a question about how such and such would continue or otherwise if we become independent, and upon receiving a perfectly good answer, they then come up with another burning issue, and another, and another, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

While some of these people no doubt have genuine issues of concern and just want some reassurance, I suspect a sizeable portion aren’t really interested in having these questions answered at all – they’re just asking them for the sake of it. The purpose of the question is not to find the answer, but to try to put independence supporters on the back foot and catch them out. They’re not looking to banish all the fears which are stopping them from voting Yes – they’re simply looking for an excuse to vote No.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

The Daily Record carries not one but two “Fury” stories today. One is headlined “Fury as new Labour councillor takes seven-week holiday just six months after being elected”, which tells pretty much the whole story without having to read the article.

(In case you were wondering, the compelling defence of the East Ayrshire comrade in question is “It’s only seven weeks.” We commend Councillor Mair’s thrift in being able to save the cost of a two-month cruise from his modest £16,000 municipal salary.)

The second piece, though, is much more disturbing. Titled “Fury at £729m bill to build schools worth a fifth of that amount”, it reveals SNP Cumbernauld MSP Jamie Hepburn’s discovery that the Labour-controlled (a fact the Record strangely overlooks) North Lanarkshire Council signed a PFI contract in 2006/07 to build and renovate schools in the area, to the value of £150m.

While that sum will have been repaid to the contractors by 2017, unlucky North Lanarkshire taxpayers will continue to hand them money for a further two decades, in the amount of a staggering £29m a year.

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We don’t know if there’s ever been an official competition for “Most British Place In Scotland”, but if there was it’s a pretty safe bet that Ibrox Stadium would win it at a canter. So we don’t suppose we ought to be surprised that this is what happened there just before the kick-off of yesterday’s SFL3 match against Peterhead:

The display was only one part of a touching and solemn commemoration of the fallen of two world wars which also included the firing of an artillery gun on the pitch (“Hey, survivors of enemy barrages, here’s a fun trip down memory lane for you!”), Broxi Bear standing with his big comedy foam head bowed in the centre circle for the minute’s silence and – we promise we’re not making any of this up – a bunch of Royal Marines abseiling down from the Govan Stand roof with the match ball.

Now, we’re sure this whole grotesque circus was conducted with the best of intentions. But anyone juxtaposing the poppy with a national flag – with any national flag – has misunderstood what it is that the poppy is supposed to stand for in the most complete and catastrophic way imaginable. This was the poppy as symbol not of remembrance and sacrifice and tragedy, but of victory.

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