Wings Over Scotland

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.

Much of the media today reports a survey showing Scots are the happiest people in Britain. Naturally that seems to us a truth as self-evident as the sun being warm and the sea being wet, but we couldn’t help noticing a particular quirk. According to the Scotsman’s piece, with our emphasis added:

“four out of the top ten local authorities in Britain were in Scotland, with the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and Aberdeenshire rated highly for life satisfaction, the number of residents who felt happy and worthwhile. Aberdeen was rated the highest-ranking city in Britain for life satisfaction, while London and Birmingham were ranked at the bottom for wellbeing”

In other words, the further away you are from London, the happier you tend to be. We trust that in the autumn of 2014, the people of Scotland will take that maxim to its logical political conclusion.

As the sun made its first appearance of the summer at the weekend, Wings over Sealand wasn’t slow off the mark. On the “B” of the “BANG!”, we leapt onto a train for a scenic two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely south-coast town of Weymouth. It’s a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.

The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires’ yachts. (Don’t miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett’s On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you’ll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.

And if you embark on about five minutes’ leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you’ll find the town’s only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.

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We’ve noted before that it’s flattering to see the grown-up media pinching this blog’s stories. Sometimes it’s possible to put it down to innocent coincidence, such as the Guardian’s report today on the sweatshop conditions of workers producing London Olympic mascots – something Wings Over Scotland readers were reading about almost a month ago. At other times, though, the plagiarism is rather more obvious.

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