Wings Over Scotland

(The long version can be found here.)

If you’re interested in Scottish constitutional politics, you can save yourself a lot of time and angst by reading Wings Over Scotland. The mainstream media has agonised all year over procedural aspects of the independence referendum, but we came right out and called it when some people were still sleeping off their Hogmanay hangovers:

“We’re going to nail our colours to the mast and make a plain assertion – the referendum WILL happen, and it WILL be conducted on the Scottish Government’s terms. We suspect that in the interests of appearing reasonable, Alex Salmond will concede either the inclusion of 16/17-year-olds on the franchise or the involvement of the Electoral Commission – but not both – and the UK Government will ultimately grant the Section 30 order necessary to remove any possibility of legal challenge.

(Also, after a great show of pretend reluctance and protest, the Scottish Government will accept the UK Government’s insistence that the referendum must comprise just a single question, because that’s what the SNP actually wants – it just wants the Unionist side to be the one that rules out the popular devo-max option, rather than itself, and helpfully the Unionists are playing right into nationalist hands there.)

For all the heat and fury, it will be so. You can quote us on that.”

Nine months later, guess what?

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We established earlier today that Ruth Davidson’s leadership of the Scottish Conservatives appears to be some sort of performance-art comedy stunt. With that in mind, we’ve managed to capture some footage of her appearance at the “United Kingdom In Action” session of the Tory conference as part of what appeared to be some sort of improv panel (also featuring Ruth’s double-act straight-man David Mundell and supporting artists from the other three parts of the country), and here present some shots of her barnstorming routine in front of an ecstatic near-sell-out crowd.

Once again, we lazily interactively invite you to suggest captions in the comments.

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Is it even worth us pulling apart Ruth Davidson’s speech(es) to the Conservative Party Annual Rally in Birmingham yesterday? For one thing, no media outlet appears to consider either of them significant enough to have recorded them and put them online. Not even the Scottish Conservatives’ own website has bothered to publish a transcript of either speech, which is moderately astonishing.

For another, Davidson herself was frantically distancing herself from her own words on the evening’s political shows, blaming the Scottish Parliament Information CEntre (SPICE) for providing accurate answers when she asked it the wrong questions. For yet another, the Guardian has already done a pretty decent job of annihilating her figures, as have numerous others.

But most tellingly of all, the entire attack on public-sector employment as a drain on “wealth-creators” is so laughably hypocritical coming from Davidson – who as far as we can tell has NEVER had a job anywhere BUT the public sector – that it can’t possibly be taken seriously. (She’s currently lucratively employed by the taxpayer as an MSP, following another well-paid job in the public sector working for the BBC).

Because if Ruth Davidson genuinely believed that all public-sector employees (you know the sort – nurses, teachers, firemen, civil servants, binmen, lollipop ladies and the like) were worthless parasites sponging off the 12% of heroic entrepreneurs who bring in all the bacon, she’d put her money where her mouth is and resign. Until she does, we can only assume that everything she says is some sort of ironic Situationist prank, and avoid falling for the joke by dignifying it with analysis it doesn’t deserve.

We’re figuring out, painfully slowly, how the painfully slow CafePress website works, and to celebrate somehow navigating our way through another horrendous maze of contradictory menus we’ve got another set of splendid items which, if purchased in sufficient numbers, will GUARANTEE Scottish independence or your money back.

Click the image to visit the new section of the store. Money-back guarantee only applicable if Scotland fails to achieve independence within 30 days.

Without setting out deliberately to be so, a site like Wings Over Scotland is inherently cynical. If you set yourself up to monitor the media, it’s implicit that you think the media needs monitoring. And as a professional journalist, both staff and freelance, for over 20 years, I’ve seen enough shady goings-on not to be shocked very often.

But today, for perhaps the first time since starting the site, I find myself genuinely filled with anger, disgust and contempt for the people plying my trade in Scotland.

Today’s Scotland On Sunday lead story isn’t even remotely close to the first time we’ve seen a Scottish newspaper cross the line from spin and smear into outright lie. It is, however, by a very considerable distance the most despicable.

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This week, we’ve been wondering just how much of a coincidence it was that Johann Lamont’s dramatic, rushed-sounding policy speech out of nowhere (surely that terrible pinched-from-the-Tories “something for nothing” line can’t have been the result of any extended scrutiny?) happened three days after the first independence rally.

Saturday 22nd September 2012 will go down in history as the moment the starting gun was fired on the referendum campaign for real. The event was a chance to show the public of Scotland that it wasn’t only “weirdy beardies” and “cyber-nuts” who support independence but everyday hard-working people just like the majority of other Scots.

And we can’t help but ponder whether the event put the wind up Scottish Labour a lot more than they spent that weekend frantically trying to pretend.

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We’re confused again, readers. At its forthcoming conference the SNP will debate whether or not to change its policy on NATO membership, in full public view. After the debate, a vote of the party’s membership will determine what the policy will be. This wholly open and natural political process is of course variously described by the Scottish media as a “split”, a “U-turn”, an “internal battle” and a source of “rebel fury”.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats refuse to allow the YesScotland campaign to take a stall at their conference, and when some members offer dissent, leader Willie Rennie angrily castigates them in a letter describing their actions as a “disrespectful stunt”, on the grounds that the media might have covered the stall’s presence.

(Great work keeping it out of the press, Willie. Just the three stories in a week, then.)

We feel we must have somehow misunderstood the meanings of the words “liberal” and “democratic”. Can anyone point us towards a more up-to-date dictionary?

The Scottish media is enthusiastically continuing to follow Labour’s agenda with regard to slashing universal services. Both of last night’s current-affairs shows led with the topic again, and it’s all over the press once more today, in particular the Scotsman and the Daily Record. The former runs one story that carries a telling quote from Scottish Labour seat-filler Richard Baker MSP:

“We can’t wait to have these difficult decisions in a couple of years. The choices need to be debated now.”

While it’s been referenced in passing, the SNP oddly hasn’t really made much of the extraordinary hollowness of this demand, given than Scottish Labour have said their commission “investigating” the matter won’t produce a report for over two years.

We don’t know about you, readers, but our understanding of a debate is that two opposing sides both present their arguments and then there’s some sort of vote which determines who best convinced the audience that their view was the right one.

The SNP’s position is clear – universal benefits can be afforded, something that the Scottish Government has already demonstrated by balancing its budget since 2007, and it will prove its point by continuing to do so in coming years. Labour, however, want to somehow have a debate without having a position. It’s rather like demanding someone plays you at football and then not turning up for the match.

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It even happened in Bath. Even in one of the richest corners of Britain – a city so posh that it refused a local organic dairy farm permission to open a boutique ice-cream concession in its expensive new shopping area in case it “lowered the tone” – there was an Occupy protest. A couple of dozen tents huddled together in Queen Square, a small green space in the middle of a busy traffic junction that’s more accustomed to hosting farmers’ markets and games of boules.

To be honest, I’m surprised there were that many. Bath’s housing, parking and public transport are all so cripplingly costly that poor people can barely get into the centre of town even for a visit. But still, like most of the Occupy protests nationwide (those that weren’t shut down, anyway), the numbers were pretty pitiful. At a time when the government has all but openly declared class war, when everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail is furious at the greed of the wealthy, why weren’t there millions on the streets, rather than a few little pockets out camping in the cold?

The answer is obvious, but for some reason is never spoken aloud. Despite the Occupy movement’s catchy and evocative slogan, we aren’t the 99%. But that’s understandable, because “we are the 33%” doesn’t carry quite the same moral punch.

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The independence movement, for all the progress it’s made, has a core problem. Support for independence is strongest amongst the poor, and although it’s rarely acknowledged, the poor aren’t the majority any more. The home-owning middle class tend to feel that they’re better off than their parents were, and even if the (mortgaged) ownership of your home is a largely illusory form of wealth it’s the feeling that matters.

Because what that means is that people who are doing okay – and doubly so if that status is precarious – don’t want to risk voting for major change and upheaval. (Most of those who are doing very nicely, thanks, out of the status quo – the rich – are probably a lost cause.) So the big challenge for the YesScotland campaign in the next two years is to pick up a significant proportion of the “squeezed middle”.

And we can’t think of a better way to convince those who are getting by, but for whom the poverty line is a little too close on their heels for comfort, that independence represents the best future than to tell them that staying in the Union will mean they get hammered for hundreds or thousands of pounds extra a year in rising Council Tax, prescriptions, tuition fees for their kids and personal care for their elderly relatives.

A great many people are only just keeping their heads above water in this long, bleak recession. Johann Lamont just threw them an anvil. We’re the lifeboat. Let’s thank her, then fling out the ropes and do our best to pull them aboard to safety.

There’s something odd about this series of pictures from the last eight years of Labour Party conferences, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Can anyone help out?

2005

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