Wings Over Scotland

As we predicted a few days ago, Sevco Scotland Limited has accepted the SFA’s condition of a 12-month transfer embargo in return for the company being allowed to take over the Association membership of the old Rangers Football Club PLC. In a novel twist, though, the SFA will not enforce the sanction until AFTER the closure of the summer transfer window on September 1st, allowing the Ibrox club to sign new players for the next six weeks, despite the embargo having been imposed in May.

Despite some of the wilder conspiracy theories circulating on the internet in recent days, the agreement was always going to happen, although we’re a little surprised (only a little, mind) at how blatantly the SFA has gone easy on the club – with over 40 players available to manager Ally McCoist even with the embargo in place, the deferral makes a mockery of the notion of punishment.

(An alert reader points out to us that the club will also be able to sign players, albeit briefly, in next summer’s transfer window, because a quirk of the calendar means it’ll be open for a day after Sevco’s embargo expires. There’s nothing to stop “Rangers” negotiating transfers next summer, then doing all the actual signings on September 2nd, so the punishment only really applies to the January 2013 window. In effect, rather than a 12-month ban it’s actually a four-week one.)

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In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.

First things first: the hysterical flouncing hissy fit that’s just broken out all over Twitter is a depressingly predictable, dismayingly stereotypical reaction to a piece of total non-news. The Scottish Government at no point announced that there would be an announcement on equal-marriage legislation today, and it therefore follows that said announcement has NOT, in fact, been “delayed“. It’s still due by the end of this month.

Nevertheless, the issue is hugely divisive, with a huge response to the government’s consultation document and mass organised opposition from religious groups. This blog believes unequivocally in full equal rights for heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, metrosexuals, retrosexuals, picosexuals, megasexuals and any other (legal) form of -sexuals, so the solution to the seemingly-intractable problem is in fact blindingly obvious – we need to ban marriage altogether. For everyone.

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There are, we’re certain, some twists to come yet in the “Rangers” story. But while we’ve been able to pretty clearly identify and understand the motivations of all the concerned parties in events to date (and our assessments and predictions have accordingly almost always been bang on the money), we’ve finally run into a logical roadblock where we just can’t make sense of anything.

Because we can no longer for the life of us figure out what the SFA is playing at.

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We’re finding it hard to get worked up about the media’s latest shock-horror revelations with regard to the SNP’s policy on NATO membership. All that’s been proposed is that the party debates its position at its annual conference, and if a party’s members agree – or not – on an alteration to a policy then that’s what the party’s policy should be. It’s an exercise of the most fundamental principle of democracy, and we can’t even really be bothered pointing out the laughable hypocrisy of it being criticised by a party that refuses to tell us its policy on just about anything, including defence.

That said, we were still deeply dismayed by Angus Robertson’s performance on last night’s Newsnight Scotland. Highly-rated by most political commentators, Robertson may be a whiz at actually drawing up policy and strategy but he’s hopeless at presenting it. While SNP figures like Nicola Sturgeon, Stewart Hosie, John Swinney and the First Minister himself have provided a breath of fresh air with direct and honest answers in interviews since coming to power, Robertson seems stuck in the mindset of Westminster, and his needlessly vague, waffling and evasive responses to Isobel Fraser’s perfectly legitimate and not especially challenging questions were like stepping back in time a decade, or watching Johann Lamont now.

To be honest, we don’t really care whether an independent Scotland is in NATO or not, so long as nuclear weapons are removed permanently from Scottish waters. We struggle to see how it would affect the day-to-day life of Scottish people, and we’re not the least bit convinced it’s a matter of pressing importance to the average voter.  But what we DO regard as a danger for the SNP and by extension the independence movement is if it comes increasingly to be seen as just like all the discredited and widely-loathed Westminster parties, rather than the genuinely different alternative to the neoliberal consensus that it actually is.

Appearances like Robertson’s last night will damage the SNP far more than an entirely reasonable debate about policy at conference, which is after all the very thing party conferences are supposed to be for. We hope someone takes him aside and points out that if we wanted useless Westminster politicians, we could just stay in the Union.

Charles Green’s new football club, currently registered under the name Sevco Scotland Ltd, is scheduled to play its first ever competitive game on July 28th, away to Brechin City in the Ramsden’s Cup. Three days after that, on July 31st, a meeting of the shareholders of Rangers Football Club PLC is due to take place.

The purpose of the meeting is to change the name of said Rangers Football Club PLC (the old about-to-be-liquidated Rangers) to RFC2012, in order that Sevco Scotland can then legally be renamed “The Rangers Football Club Limited”. (That name being too similar to that of the old Rangers for the two to be allowed to exist simultaneously.)

An interesting question therefore arises: What will be the name of the team that takes the field against Brechin on the 28th?

It can’t be “Rangers”. It has to be called something. What will it be?

We’re deeply flattered to be described as both a “key website” and part of “a renaissance in Scottish media” by the Guardian today, and to be mentioned in the same breath as such esteemed and high-quality entities as the Orwell Prize-winning Rangers Tax Case blog, the vibrant all-club news site/forum Pie And Bovril, the forensic and authoritative Random Thoughts Re Scots Law and more.

So we hope you’ll bear with us as we embark on what should be one of the very last few posts on the Rangers Fiasco. Events may overtake us as we write this, with the SPL meeting going on as we speak, but for the record we’ve rubbished the idea of an SPL2 being in any way feasible before and we absolutely don’t expect anything to have changed in that regard by the time we get to the end of this feature.

As things stand, and as we expect them to continue to stand for at least the next 24 hours, a football club of some sort and some name, owned by Sevco Scotland Ltd, will play in Division 3 of the Scottish Football League this coming season. More than that, though, it’s really not possible to say.

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I was going to blog about Rangers today, but it can wait. I’ve been a professional journalist for over 20 years now, but I almost never write about my personal life. You can search those decades with a fine tooth comb for a mention of who I’m going out with and come up empty. When people ask “Are you really a Reverend?” I’ll go so far as to answer “Yes”, but when they then invariably enquire as to which church I always reply “The United Episcopalian Brotherhood Of Mind Your Own Damn Business”.

I have no objections at all to others baring their souls for the world to see if that’s how they want to go about their affairs, but I like to keep my private life private and that’s not about to change now, except for this picture and the paragraph after it.

It’s of my lovely Auntie Isobel, a saintly woman at whom life threw just about every crappy card in the deck but who always came back smiling and laughing, barely even acknowledging her own troubles as she devoted herself to caring for others. I hadn’t seen her in many years, and now I never will again after I helped my cousins and uncles and my dad, whose little sister she was, carry her coffin from a tiny village church to a quiet leafy graveyard and lower it gently into the ground of Argyll.

Rest in peace, Auntie Isobel. I think, and I hope, you’d forgive me for mentioning you on a politics blog – I have no idea who you voted for – because coming home to say goodbye to you showed me why it is that I do it.

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The Clyde FC website is struggling to cope with the weight of traffic again after it released a statement on yesterday’s events. It took us ten minutes and many reloads to reach the page, so here it is for anyone who can’t get through. All emphasis ours.

“The club chairman attended a very sobering meeting of the SFL today where the 30 clubs voted on resolutions in the manner that they felt were, on balance, for the good of the game. Nobody had arrived at decisions easily and all had been placed in intolerable positions of having to decide without the basic information that would reflect good governance and having to speculate about unresolved matters around sanctions and membership of the SFA that other bodies had so far failed to deal with.

The outcome was never going to be a good one, but it was one of significant unity amongst the clubs, and even where clubs voted differently, it was not a divisive difference of views, everyone understood the complex mix of circumstances facing each club would never deliver unanimity of voting.

We reported this morning prior to the vote of all clubs that “Sevco Scotland Ltd will not be playing in the Third Division in the coming season”. Nothing heard today altered that opinion, in fact, it strengthened it.

For the good of the game we need to see the SFA accept the will of its members, who all voted today, as members of the SFL, in the clear knowledge that the SFA had it in its power to refuse to transfer SFA membership to Sevco Scotland Ltd should the vote support the entry of Sevco Scotland Ltd into SFL3.

We were asked to respect the confidentiality of those presenting today as only that agreement would allow them to be as candid as they were, we cannot therefore share what was said, however Mr Green left the SFL member clubs in no doubt about what he had been told by the SFA.

The SFL saw a level of unity and unselfishness that owes significant credit to the first division clubs who stated their intention to seek a 42 club solution and not to take part in a divisive alternative. This kind of unity if maintained will help deliver the change that the game so badly needs and the first division clubs in particular will merit.

If the SFA now act to support any process to undermine the clear views of the SFL members, who are also members of the SFA, then this club will join others in questioning those in leadership.

Sadly for our game, this saga is not over, teams cannot plan and that includes Rangers, who may yet be denied the opportunity to play football in SFL 3 because it suits the interests of others.”