Wings Over Scotland

A recent YouGov survey for the Fabian Society has made a few headlines this week, and justfiably so because it’s rather more interesting than the usual ones we get. It covers a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on Labour, resulting in an entertaining but ultimately not very useful headline in the Scotsman. (Though if the poll had asked respondents to select characteristics for the other parties too, our guess is that the SNP would still have come out on top.)

Other places have chosen instead to highlight the outcome of a curiously-worded question about independence, showing a 54-30 lead for the No campaign with 16% still undecided, while Lallands Peat Worrier breaks down some of the demographics to his usual fascinating effect. But it’s a derivative of one of those breakdowns that produces an intriguing result.

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We expect next month’s Wings Over Scotland viewing figures to take a pretty big fall, as politics will still be on holiday and there won’t be any more stories about the Rangers saga to fill the gaping NewsChasm (tm) left by the summer “silly season”. So we hope you’ll allow us this toot on our stat-trumpet before the inevitable slide.

July saw yet another record-smashing month for the blog, piling almost 40,000 page views onto the previous high – a 17% increase – and boosting the number of unique visitors by an even more startling 27%, to just shy of 30,000. The running total of 986,764 pageviews since we started nine months ago means that in August we should at least be able to boast of breaking through the 1-million barrier well within our first year, which will be some small degree of consolation.

It’s traditional at this point to cough modestly and hopefully towards the “Donate” button – we’ve got just about enough cash from generous viewers now to get on with moving to a more robust server, under our “official” domain name that won’t see the blog blocked for some readers for having “game” in its address – but mostly we just wanted to say thanks once more to the people who are increasingly making Wings Over Scotland their first stop for Scottish political news with just slightly too much focus on football. We’ll try not to let you down.

After the huge fuss that was made in the media about Scottish and Welsh football players not singing “God Save The Queen” during their opening games at the Olympics, we were a bit surprised to find nobody mentioning the issue after their second matches. Even a Twitter enquiry unusually failed to produce a single person who knew if they had or not, and we eventually had to go and watch the recording of Great Britain vs the United Arab Emirates on iPlayer to find out.

As it turned out, the five Welsh players in the starting 11 had stayed resolutely silent while their English comrades on the field and in the technical area all strenuously implored God to intervene in the fate of the monarch. “Again the Welsh boys in the side chose not to sing the anthem, it’s not the national anthem of Wales of course”, said the BBC’s commentator Jonathan Pearce, having seemingly failed to notice that Wales was not one of the countries taking part in the competition.

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Yesterday we ran a short piece about a report published by what the Scotsman referred to as a new “centre-left” think-tank called the Scotland Institute. We’d been unable to find out much about this new outfit before going off to watch another one squeeze past Brechin City, but while we messed around taking silly pictures of football the dedicated readers of Wings Over Scotland set to work doing our research for us.

In doing so, they uncovered some very interesting information about the Scotland Institute and its driving force. We think it’s reasonably safe to say that on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, the term “centre-left” is stretching the bounds of credibility far beyond any reasonable assessment.

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We hope you’ll forgive us this last one, just for fun.

All the best odysseys begin in a hedge.

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We were intrigued by a story in Scotland On Sunday this morning, concerning the first output of a new “centre-left” group calling itself the Scotland Institute (which seems to have no website). The organisation’s debut report concludes that the “ideal” solution to the problem of poverty in Scotland is to elect “a UK-level government that is prepared to turn its back on the neo-liberal economic and social policies that have done so much damage and then a Scottish Government that can adapt that wider framework to meet the particular challenges faced in Scotland”, rather than for Scotland to become independent and elect an anti-neoliberal government of its own.

Mysteriously, however, the report neglects to identify just who this UK government “prepared to turn its back on the neo-liberal economic and social policies that have done so much damage” might potentially be. It can’t possibly be thinking of Labour, who in 13 years of Westminster power increased the gap between rich and poor, and upheld the neoliberal consensus so enthusiastically and dogmatically that Margaret Thatcher described Tony Blair as a “kindred spirit” (this at a time when there was still a Conservative PM in Downing Street and most of those on the left saw Blair as some sort of anti-Tory messiah) and her natural heir, while Norman Tebbit approvingly applied the same accolade to Gordon Brown.

We’re a bit concerned that an organisation we presume considers itself to be a source of serious grown-up analysis has concluded that the best solution to Scottish poverty is for Scots to somehow persuade everyone in the UK to vote for a political party that doesn’t actually exist. If it’s all the same to the Scotland Institute, we’ll continue to focus on addressing the issue via methods that aren’t entirely based on fairytales.

Our apologies to anyone who had trouble accessing the blog over the last 36 hours or so. While a few concerned emails asked whether we’d forgotten to renew the domain name, in fact the problem was the opposite – we DID renew it, several days early, but the transaction caused our rubbish registrants to reset the nameservers by mistake, and although their speedy online support managed to identify the problem and help us get the proper details back, the nature of DNS propagation meant that it took a while to get the old ones fully out of the system.

(We regularly saw the page flip from the proper one to the placeholder several times in the space of ten minutes, as late as yesterday evening, and annoyingly it’s probably cost us the chance of breaking the cumulative million-page-views mark this month.)

Everything should finally be fine for everyone now. If you manage to read this page but then the site vanishes again, please let us know.

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When we knocked up this image in Paintshop for a bit of fun a month ago, we had no idea it was going to turn out to be quite so prophetic. The final act of the Rangers saga is going to play out just like the three-way Mexican standoff at the end of Reservoir Dogs, with Sevco, the SFA and the SPL all shouting furiously, pointing guns at each other and daring the other to crack first.

Charles Green’s consortium is still, at time of writing, thought to be refusing to accept the SPL’s right to pursue the dual-contracts investigation against Rangers Football Club PLC (in liquidation) and apply its findings to Sevco Scotland Limited. By doing so, it is in effect holding the whole of Scottish football to ransom. If our game is to survive the next 48 hours with any integrity and meaning whatsoever, the SPL, having (with massive reluctance) come this far, must not blink.

Because any Doctor Who fan will tell you what happens if you blink now.

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There seem to be a lot of things disappearing from the Scottish media today. First the interesting Robbie Dinwoodie story on Olympic football in the Herald does the Bermuda-Triangle routine, and then we see this odd piece in The Scotsman. It opens powerfully, promising to refute (or at least contest) one of the commonest and most compelling arguments made in favour of independence:

“ED MILIBAND has attacked the SNP’s suggestion that Scots face a choice of either independence or Conservative rule from Westminster as the Labour leader made his latest intervention in the referendum debate.”

We’ve read the rest of the short article three times now, however, without being able to locate a single sentence in which Mr Miliband (pictured in the piece as the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) refers to said choice in even the most oblique passing manner, far less “attacks” it. We’re rather keen to hear the official Labour answer, too. Can any eagle-eyed readers help us out?

The headline above (and slight variants thereof) is a time-honoured response to reports of any event at which the reader’s interpretation of proceedings might differ significantly to that of the writer. Today’s press provides a striking example of the phenomenon.

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Just seven months ago, we ran a piece castigating some of Scotland’s nationalists for their ludicrously churlish and negative assessment of the SNP’s first half-year as a majority administration. Several high-profile pro-independence bloggers had attacked the Scottish Government for an opening programme that was variously described as “despairing, girning, partisan, vacuous and dreary”.

We criticised them at the time, and today we feel thoroughly vindicated in the light of the news that the SNP will indeed bring forward a bill to legalise gay marriage in Scotland, making it the first part of the UK to do so.

The bill will be the third major seriously contentious one to be put before Parliament by the majority government in barely over a year, following hot on the heels of the anti-sectarianism bill and minimum alcohol pricing. All three were faced with considerable political and/or public opposition, and it seems extremely likely that the sectarianism bill cost the SNP a significant number of votes in May’s local council elections, particularly in and around Glasgow.

The equal-marriage bill, opposed by around 65% of respondents to the consultation, may very well cost it more, particularly among the Catholic community it only recently won over after years of work. And it won’t win many in compensation from the gay community, which is noisy but vastly smaller than the Church and in any event spent most of last week engaged in a colossally ungrateful and petulant sulking fit that the Government hadn’t made the announcement on the exact day they wanted it to.

But even with an independence referendum to win, Alex Salmond’s cabinet has pressed ahead with doing the things it believes are in the interests of the people of Scotland, even if that means damaging their own party and jeopardising the thing some of them have fought their whole lives to achieve. This blog can think of no greater tribute to bestow on any government than that it’s prepared to lose votes, and considerable numbers of them, to do the right thing. We salute it without reservation.