Wings Over Scotland

The Daily Record carries the results of an interesting poll today. Carried out by the paper itself among its own readers, it shows conclusive support for a range of SNP policies. For example, 79% of Record readers want to retain Sterling should Scotland become independent, in line with the Nats’ position. They want Scotland to remain a member of the EU by a ratio of almost two to one (55% to 29%). They want to stay in NATO by an overwhelming margin of 68% to 13%. And abolishing Trident is backed by more than three-to-two (47% vs 31%) among the poll’s respondents.

You’d imagine that Scotland’s second-biggest-selling newspaper might be pleased that the country’s government so comprehensively reflects the desires of its own readers, wouldn’t you? And yet unaccountably, the Record appears to be furious about it.

“Our poll shows voters back the SNP’s blueprint for independence – and that’s exactly how Alex Salmond planned it”, the Record froths, as if putting forward a manifesto that people like and support was some kind of dishonourable, underhand tactic. “The SNP have thrown political beliefs out of their window in a desperate attempt to convince Scots to put a cross beside the Yes box in 2014”, it continues, seemingly in the belief that listening to the electorate is the most dastardly crime in the government playbook.

Much of the piece is of course given over to angry reactions from Labour and Unionist spokespersons, who we commend the Record on getting to actually turn up. And it ends rather abruptly, as if the Record’s exasperation at the sheer effrontery of the SNP in continuing to be popular has rendered it speechless. But ultimately, even Labour’s most loyal propaganda organ reluctantly faces the basic fact that the SNP can legitimately claim to be speaking for the people of Scotland, while Scottish Labour can’t even speak for itself. We suspect the Record has more such dark days ahead.

There was a shock admission from Anas Sarwar, “deputy” leader of Scottish Labour, when speaking about the referendum on BBC Scotland’s “The Big Debate” last night:

“This will be the biggest decision that any of you will make in your lifetime, and what we need actually is Yes.”

It’s not every day we agree with the often factually-challenged MP for Glasgow Central, but this time we think he’s hit the nail square on the head.

(Because it’s fine to just cut people’s quotes short to suit your own purposes, right?)

We have absolutely no idea what to make of this, sent to us by a Dutch friend this morning. But as the UK press obsesses over its own vision of a malignant European omnistate, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the very different picture of a possible future our friends on the continent foresee. And at least we’re not “Skintland”.

We’ll probably watch and comment on The Big Debate later, incidentally. It just takes an awfully big effort of will to listen to Anas Sarwar these days.

No. No it won’t.

Here’s a little weekend brainteaser for you, folks. On the BBC’s This Week show on Saturday, veteran presenter Andrew Neil interviewed two former senior government ministers about the UK’s nuclear deterrent – one was a Conservative former Defence Secretary, the other a Labour former Culture Secretary. For now we’ll call them Politician A and Politician B.

See if you can match the following quotes to the person who said them.

ANDREW NEIL: What is your view – should [Trident] be renewed?

POLITICIAN A: No, I think it’s all nonsense.

NEIL: Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?

POLITICIAN A: No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent, because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent, because now largely we are facing the sorts of enemies – the Taliban, Al Qaeda – who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. It’s a tremendous waste of money, it’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige, it’s wasteful, and at the margins it is proliferatory.

NEIL: Okay. But the government – or at least the Conservative part of the coalition – looks like they’re going to proceed with it. What will [your party’s] position be on it [, Politician B]?

POLITICIAN B: Actually, the position that Phillip Hammond has taken is very close to the position that we agreed some time ago when [Politician C] was Defence Secretary. The decision about whether to proceed […] won’t be taken until 2016…

NEIL: …but you’re happy that Mr Hammond’s going ahead with the spending, the seed money, which allows the decision if you want to?

POLITICIAN B: Yeah, completely, yes, yeah.

We’re going to assume that you’re ahead of us here, readers. The former Tory Defence Secretary (Michael Portillo) is, of course Politician A, the one who thinks that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is a pointless, ineffectual waste of time and money aimed solely at letting the UK grandstand on the world stage, while the former Labour Cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) is Politician B, who wants to spend billions of pounds just on the preparatory research for upgrading it – let alone the £84bn cost of actually doing so – at a time when her party is telling us that we can’t afford to educate our young people or look after the elderly.

You can watch this remarkable development for as long as it’s still available on the iPlayer (from 31 minutes), or listen to a permanent audio clip here. The politics of the Union are now truly through the looking glass.

A front-page piece in today’s Scotland On Sunday expands on Gordon Brown’s attempted intervention in the independence debate yesterday with an extraordinary headline which appears to be based on an actual quote from the former Prime Minister: “SNP plan makes Scotland a colony, claims Gordon Brown”.

Sure enough, Brown is reported as saying that an independence for Scotland would be “a form of self-imposed colonialism more reminiscent of the old empire than of the modern world”. Which raises an obvious question: given that an independent Scotland would by any definition have vastly more control of its own affairs than it does now, doesn’t that mean it must currently be something far less than a colony?

The only status we can think of for a nation that’s arguably lower than a “colony” is that of a vassal state. Wikipedia’s definition of that term certainly seems to apply to Scotland: we pay “tribute” to the UK (by contributing a greater share of its revenues than we get back in spending), and we also “provide military power to the dominant state”, both directly in the form of troops and by giving a home to the UK’s nuclear weapons, an important political tool which it wouldn’t be able to retain otherwise.

Wiki goes on to add that a more common modern term for a vassal state is “puppet state”. If you’ve got a minute, Gordon, can you just confirm for us that you and the rest of the Unionist alliance currently see Scotland as a puppet state of England? Cheers.

Gordon Brown doesn’t turn up in the House Of Commons very much. He’s represented his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituents at just 14% of votes since stepping down as Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, not bothering to voice an opinion on their behalf at 545 out of 635 divisions. But at least we’ve now found out why.

Brown has barely signed in to earn his £200,000-a-year salary for the last 30 months because he’s been busy working on a list of 22 questions to ask the SNP. We can tell he’s devoted his time to it single-handedly, because the list – unveiled at a speech in his constituency yesterday – has clearly never been anywhere near a sub-editor. It’s a clunking, bloated lump of leaden prose, almost entirely bereft of punch, coherence and even basic readability – any primary-school English teacher worth their salt would hold the former Prime Minister back for some extra lessons on first glance.

Nevertheless, because we’re professionals we’ve ploughed through the double negatives, split infinitives and stultifying repetition to make some sort of sense of it, and in the interests of opening up debate we’ve come up with answers to all of Gordon’s queries, even though we’re not actually in the SNP. Read on below.

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As the Scottish people ponder the merits of independence, it can be useful to examine areas in which Holyrood rather than Westminster already controls policy, and one of the most obvious is healthcare. The NHS is in almost all operational senses already independent in Scotland, and operates in a markedly different manner to the way the service is run in England and Wales.

But as we recently revealed, the Scottish NHS remains subject to hidden budget cuts as a result of the Barnett Formula, as well as the headline cuts imposed to Scotland’s block grant under Westminster austerity. The question, then, is whether this devolved form of “independence” is enough to maintain the standards of healthcare Scots have come to expect.

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After ten days, we have an answer, of sorts.

“Dear Rev Campbell

Reference CAS-1714825-RP7R5W

Thank you for your e-mail. Your comments were passed to the Editor of Newsnight Scotland, who has asked that I forward his response as follows:

“Thank you for getting in touch with us about the Newsnight Scotland interview with Nicola Sturgeon on 23rd October.

We have received a number of complaints about this item, most of them concerning the sound quality of the interview and a number alleging politically-motived bias.

To take each in turn:

I accept that the sound quality of this item fell short of the standards we would expect and apologise if this detracted from your enjoyment of the interview. However, I do not believe that the editorial sense of that interview was compromised by the technical problems. I have investigated what went wrong in this instance and have taken appropriate steps to ensure that something similar does not occur in future.

Some have suggested that the BBC in some way deliberately ‘doctored’ the interview for reasons of political bias; others suggested that it was not a technical fault but a deliberate attempt to suppress the words of the Deputy First Minister. Either suggestion implies that we were happy to be grossly unprofessional and, thereby, seriously to breach all of the journalistic standards which the BBC has striven for so many years to achieve and which are encapsulated in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. I can only repeat – this was an unfortunate technical matter for which I again apologise.

Thank you again for taking the time and the trouble to be in touch about the programme.”

Details of the BBC complaints process are available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

Kind Regards

Patrick McManus
BBC Complaints”

As often tends to be the case with BBC responses, it produces more questions than answers. The nature of the “technical fault” is not clarified, there’s nothing on how it managed to get past the producer without the failure being noticed and be broadcast, and nor – more tellingly – is there any explanation of why there was no apology broadcast on either that night’s show or the following evening’s. Even if we take the reply at face value with regard to the incident itself, we all pay a significant (and mandatory) fee for the BBC and we deserve more respect than that.

But most curiously of all, if you read it closely the reply doesn’t in fact deny the suggestions of bias. It merely says, if we might paraphrase, “If you believe we’d do such a thing, then you must be prepared to believe that we’re biased.” It rather conspicuously doesn’t go on to add “But we’re not”, instead merely leaving the reader to infer it without it actually being said.

We feel compelled to note once again that in the event of a vote for independence, everyone at BBC Scotland would be out of a job. We’re not sure how conducive to impartiality that is, and we suspect it could certainly stretch to turning a blind eye to an initially non-deliberate gremlin in the works. We will, as ever, continue to monitor.

Watching FMQs yesterday, a thought suddenly occurred to us. Is it possible that a lot of Scottish people’s reluctance to support independence isn’t because they think the south-east of England knows what’s best for Scotland, but because they’re simply terrified of the possibility of someone other than the SNP winning an election to an independent Scottish Parliament, and thereby risking putting the entire nation in the hands of the likes of Johann Lamont, Jackie Baillie and Richard Baker?

Have we been making a terrible tactical error all this time? Should we, in fact, spend the next two years bigging up Scottish Labour and the rest of the Holyrood opposition instead of mercilessly exposing their hapless ineptitude at every turn? Should we do our best to reassure a frightened electorate that should the SNP split after independence (which some people think it will, though we don’t), there’s nothing to fear from a government that might include Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and James Kelly and have control of ALL of Scotland’s finances, welfare and defence?

Because if so we’ll give it a shot. But frankly, that’s going to be a tough sell.

It’s got flowers on it and everything.

Gemma Fox is a rather strange lady who makes Lego dioramas of Royal Marine Commandos and who we had a childish but enlightening recreational argument with on Twitter last night. (Funnily enough after a long and tiring day visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.) James Mackenzie is a Green activist and one of the editors of the once-popular and increasingly-ironically-named Better Nation blog.

(Mackenzie threw an impressive hissy fit earlier this week when we very politely challenged him to support a seemingly-baseless allegation about another blogger, even going so far as to claim “harassment” on the basis of someone responding civilly to comments made in an open public forum. Presumably, as a Better Nation editor he’s just not used to people answering him back without being able to censor them.)

Ms Fox generously warned us last night that we had until “2000 hrs” this evening to delete unspecified tweets from our account, and that we should also “warn yer pals”. (We’re not quite sure who that means, but it might be you, so we thought we’d better let you know.) If we vanish suddenly at 8.01pm under legal action – the threat of which we’re sure is real and serious, and definitely not just the mad rantings of a delusional internet lunatic – speak kindly of us when we’re gone. We had a good run.

Crikey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Wings Over Scotland is a year old today. The site was created on the 1st of November 2011 with the import of a clutch of Scottish-politics posts from my personal blog, though it didn’t go properly officially public with an original post of its own until a week later. And jings, readers, what a birthday present it is you’ve given us:

Click on the image for an enlarged version showing all the stats. The site’s pageviews increased by a staggering 53% last month, and the number of unique readers by 54%. October 2012 was also the first time we’ve attracted more than 100,000 views in a single seven-day period. We’re gobsmacked.

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