Wings Over Scotland

Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.

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We hope the turnout for the independence rally in Edinburgh tomorrow is good. We encourage you to go if you can – the weather’s going to be quite nice, and it’s always lovely to be in Edinburgh for any reason. But we’re not quite sure what the point of it is or what it hopes to achieve, because as far as we can see the most – indeed, just about the only – likely outcome of it is a big propaganda coup for the No campaign.

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From “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell, published in 1949:

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

From the Daily Record, 20 September 2012:

“Iain Duncan Smith promises more disabled benefits cuts in Scotland: the Work and Pensions Secretary was the man behind bringing in Atos, who have been criticised for humiliating fit-for-work tests.”

Atos Healthcare was first employed to conduct Work Capability Assessments on claimants of Incapacity Benefit (and other disability benefits) in October 2008, under the Labour government of Gordon Brown, when said Labour government introduced Employment Support Allowance in order to reduce the welfare bill by replacing the previous benefits with one that was, for most recipients, around a third lower.

A 2009 report by the Citizens Advice Bureau highlighted Atos’ tendency to find people unexpectedly fit for work, but Brown’s government took no action against the company.

Iain Duncan Smith has merely continued Labour policy, using the same company hired by Labour to carry it out. The Daily Record is attempting to nakedly rewrite history to excuse Labour from responsibility for a measure which hurts a great many Record readers. Unfortunately for the Record, people are watching.

31 years ago, when Alan Grant wrote "Strontium Dog: Portrait Of A Mutant" for 2000AD, the notion that the father of a "mutant" child might become Prime Minister and oversee a programme of astonishing, vindictive persecution of the disabled by tormenting them with "work capability" tests and forcing them out of their homes (supported by "scrounger"-hating newspapers published on thin electronic tablets) was a crazy, dystopian sci-fi fantasy for kids.

Today, David Cameron presides over a government set implacably on slashing £30bn from the welfare budget (to pay for tax cuts for millionaires, obviously) by cutting housing and disability benefits for the profoundly handicapped and the terminally-ill, ingeniously saving more money by driving many of them to suicide as a result of measures even the Daily Mail is forced to decry as inhuman.

Enjoy watching "Dredd" this weekend, viewers. Keep telling yourself it's only a movie.

If you’re still not convinced that the UK coalition government’s plans to “reform” welfare – by slashing tens of billions of pounds from the DWP’s budget, in order to fund tax cuts for the rich – are an example of pure, unambiguous evil at work, we suggest you spend half an hour reading this page and the ones linked at the bottom of it.

Done that? Filled with boiling rage and an urge to commit violent acts of revolution? Good. That suggests that you’re a vaguely decent human being with at least some basic level of compassion for the most vulnerable people in society. Congratulations.

It probably also means you’re NOT a Labour Party politician or activist, because a 2010 report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (entitled “Not much disagreement on welfare reform”) pointed out that Labour’s policy on the brutal state persecution of the poor and the crippled – like its policies in almost all other areas – differs from that of the Tories and Lib Dems only in degree and speed, and even then only slightly.

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Alert readers will have noticed that we gave up on maintaining our Scottish media appearance log a while back. With pressures of work and a shortage of help, it was just too much to keep up with by ourselves, requiring hours of monitoring every day even just for the “big three” of Good Morning Scotland, Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland, let alone shows like Call Kaye or anything on commercial radio.

However, we did continue to record appearances for quite a while after our last report, so it seemed remiss not to at least compile the stats to that point, which covered the first five months of 2012. The figures for January 1st to May 31st are as noted below.

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Barely a day’s gone by since we started this site on which we haven’t cursed our failure to save an opinion piece we read in one of the English broadsheet newspapers a few months before the 2011 Holyrood election.

Labour were riding high in the polls, and the more exciteable elements of the Unionist press in Scotland were even tentatively talking of an absolute majority. But the column we read in the Telegraph, or the Times, or perhaps even the Mail On Sunday, by a writer whose name we can’t recall a syllable of, was having none of it.

It confidently predicted an SNP victory, despite them being something like 12/1 against with the bookies at the time, on very simple grounds: no matter what the polls say, when it comes to the crunch voters never elect the party with the worst leader. The most famous UK example is Neil Kinnock, but our infuriatingly-unknown author pinned the same label on Iain Gray, and was proven right in the most spectacular manner. We may have forgotten his name, but we’ve never forgotten the lesson.

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It was all the way back in February that this site started questioning the true nature of Johann Lamont’s unprecedented “leadership” of Scottish Labour. For the first time in the party’s history, the Scottish branch was supposedly (and somewhat ironically) completely independent of UK Labour, with Lamont allegedly in charge not just of the MSP group in Holyrood – the limited remit of her predecessors – but also all of Labour’s Scottish MPs at Westminster and the whole Scottish party organisation.

Ever since, in the interests of journalistic accuracy, we’ve put the word “leader” in inverted commas whenever we’ve referred to Ms Lamont’s position, because the evidence just kept stacking up that her authority simply wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. An impartial observer arriving from Pluto and watching the Scottish press and media for a few months would have come away with the impression that she was – at best – fourth in command, behind Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and Jim Murphy.

True to form, the Scottish newspapers are running approximately six months behind Wings Over Scotland when it comes to political observation and analysis, so last weekend they were right on schedule when they finally noticed that Scottish Labour’s power structures perhaps weren’t what they seemed.

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We’ve already seen that the latest Social Attitudes Survey reveals Scotland to be a deeply schizophrenic country, which wants independence but doesn’t want to admit it (even, it seems, to itself). But the deeper you get into the statistics the stranger the picture gets. Ponder, for example, the “Expectations” section.

The survey asked “If Scotland was an independent country, would the following things be better or worse than they are now?”, and recorded the answers in six categories.

NATIONAL PRIDE
Better: 67%
Worse: 2%

VOICE IN THE WORLD
Better: 51%
Worse: 19%

HEALTH SERVICE
Better: 37%
Worse: 19%

STANDARD OF LIVING
Better: 34%
Worse: 23%

ECONOMY
Better: 34%
Worse: 29%

TAXES
Better: 10%
Worse: 53%

(All other respondents in each category thought there would be no difference.)

So we see that Scots think independence will mean higher taxes. (Though it’s not clear WHY they think that – the SNP only has influence over Council Tax, and they’ve cut that in real terms in every one of their five years of government). But people also think that in return for those taxes they’ll get a healthier economy, a stronger NHS, a louder voice in the world, more national pride and, crucially, a better standard of living.

Seems like a good deal, no? Is it not worth paying higher taxes if it results in a higher standard of living and better public services (basically the Scandinavian model beloved of the SNP), especially if you fancy yourselves as a somewhat left-wing nation? You’d think so. By any measure, the survey shows that the nationalists have won the argument – the people believe that independence will mean a better Scotland.

But when offered that higher standard of living, that prouder, more confident country with a stronger economy and superior public services, the people of Scotland bizarrely turn away from the change that they themselves believe would deliver it. There’s only one rational reason for that disconnect between thought and deed, and it’s fear.

So far the “No” campaign has been founded entirely in scaremongering, and the creation of doubt and uncertainty. And it’s plainly working, to at least some degree, because it’s got the people frightened to act in what they think are their own interests. So expect the negative campaigning to continue all the way up to the referendum.

But at the same time, note that the percentage of people saying they’d vote Yes has only been higher in two of the last 14 years. Note that support is up by a third compared to the year the SNP came to power, despite the economic catastrophe that’s unfolded since then. Note that support for independence is highest – by far – among the young and vital, and lowest among the dying.

You don’t often win the argument and lose the vote. Two years to go.

As we’ve previously noted, it’s always nice to know that the mainstream media in both Scotland and the UK is keeping an eye on our humble little site. We noticed some strangely familiar statistics popping up in Graham Spiers’ piece on Craig Levein in yesterday’s Sunday Herald, for example.

But today we’re pleased to see the press picking up on a facet of the latest sample of Scottish opinion in a Social Attitudes Survey which we raised during the last one, way back in December 2011 – namely the Scottish electorate’s bizarre confusion over the meaning of independence.

Most of today’s papers report the headline finding of 32% support for a Yes vote in the 2014 referendum, but this time around they’ve also managed to point out the thing we observed last year: if you rephrase the question, asking voters if they think Holyrood rather than Westminster should control every aspect of Scottish government – in other words, that Scotland should be independent – the proportion in favour leaps dramatically upwards. In this case, it shoots by more than a third to 43%, more than twice the number (21%) who support the status quo and considerably more than those in favour of so-called “devo-max” (29%).

With the two surveys producing near-identical results, the only rational conclusion it’s possible to draw is that the i-word itself is the problem. The people of Scotland, it turns out, actually DO want independence more than any other constitutional arrangement, so long as you don’t actually call it that. As the survey itself notes with pleasing understatement, “Evidently there is something of a puzzle to be unravelled here.”

Meanwhile, we have a tip for news and cutting-edge-analysis fans: if you want to see what’s going to be in the Scottish press tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, just keep reading Wings Over Scotland and then wait a while.

We need to come up with a name for this sort of thing. The weekend saw a prime example of the cynical, dishonest negativity that’s been inherent in the “Better Together” campaign since day one (and indeed, long before it was named as such).

Two stories about things being banned appeared in Sunday’s papers – the ejection of the “Scottish Republican Socialist Movement” from participation in this month’s march and rally for independence in Edinburgh, and the BBC’s successful complaint against “Better Together” for using its logo in a campaign leaflet. The former got more prominence, as the headline story in Scotland on Sunday in which Labour’s Jim Murphy used the incident as an excuse to smear the SNP despite not a shred of evidence being offered to suggest that the party even knew of the existence of the SRSM (which as far as we can gather is three blokes in a shed), let alone that it was comfortable with its cartoonishly extremist stance.

The anti-independence campaign, meanwhile, declined to offer an apology to the BBC for the illegal use of its logo, and instead took the opportunity to proudly announce that it would be reprinting 100,000 copies of an amended version of the offending leaflet, apparently in response to the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine pointing out the misdeed.

Readers of this site will of course be entirely familiar with this modus operandi, by which random and often anonymous internet nutters who happen to support independence (even if they in fact belong to entirely different parties) are treated as SNP spokesmen acting with the backing of, and speaking for, the SNP leadership. Yet on the Union side even official named representatives – often elected MPs and MSPs, who are paid by the public to represent all their constituents, including those who want independence – are never held accountable for their words and actions.

(Johann Lamont, for example, is yet to publicly reprimand a single one of the numerous Labour MPs and MSPs who have compared Alex Salmond to genocidal murderers, despite Labour regularly forming shrieking lynch mobs demanding the resignation of all and sundry if some minor council-election candidate from the SNP says something mildly contentious on his private Facebook page.)

We haven’t thought of a snappy name for this dismal phenomenon of deliberate double standards yet. It’d save a lot of trouble if we could just refer to it by a category name and avoid having to explain it every time, because we’d put good money on it continuing to happen for the next two years. Anyone got any ideas?

We're just beginning to see how the future of the UK will look under austerity. The full horror of the cuts may not be due to bite until later in 2013, but already we can see where and how they're likely to affect the UK population. Among the most controversial of these measures (so far) are the proposed regional levels for pay and welfare.

The regional pay proposals would see public workers paid less the further from the south-east of England they work (although devolved services in Scotland would be spared this), while the regional welfare payments would see a person on benefits paid less if they live in a poor area of the UK.

At present, government jobs are split into pay bands, with those on a certain band in one occupation earning roughly the equivalent of another public sector worker on the same band in another occupation. There's room for manoeuvre within the bands, but not much. These banding brackets are agreed through national pay negotiations by unions, ensuring that staff are treated fairly and consistently regardless of where they work. However, the creation of regional pay proposals puts an end to that idea.

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