Wings Over Scotland

It’s been remarkable watching the awkward reactions of Alex Salmond’s detractors to his appearance at the Leveson inquiry yesterday. Over two hours of questioning didn’t manage so much as a scratch on the First Minister, with even ardent Unionist hacks forced to admit that Salmond was “skooshing” the proceedings and describing it as an “effortless stroll” for the SNP leader. Even the Herald’s Iain Macwhirter, a normally-intelligent commentator recently driven half-demented by hatred for Murdoch, was forced to concede that Salmond had sailed through unharmed.

With opposition politicians and activists (and even some supposedly-loyal nationalists) having long been forecasting a humiliating inquisition for Salmond at the hands of Robert Jay, there’s currently a great deal of sour muttering and embarrassed shuffling of feet going on in Unionist ranks, personified on Newsnight Scotland last night by Labour’s unfortunate Paul Martin, who didn’t seem to quite know what to do with himself except mumble some vague waffle about there having been no conclusive proof that the Scottish Government maintaining cordial relations with one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers would likely be beneficial to Scottish employment.

The depressing thing about the opposition’s reaction is its sheer petulance and intellectual bankruptcy, typified by a thoroughly dispiriting argument we had yesterday. It doesn’t matter how comprehensively, how often or by whom the SNP are cleared of any sort of wrongdoing, or how many rational, logical, sensible explanations for things are offered – Labour and the other opponents of independence simply turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, flatly refusing to accept any reality they don’t like and endlessly repeating their demands for “answers”, even though they’ve just been given them.

For the record and easy reference, though, we’ll quickly run through them again below.

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Since the disaster that befell our Super HypocrisOMeter 5000, we’ve been pretty careful with our equipment budget. But this week, after being caught on the hop by the unexpected early conclusion to the Rangers CVA saga, Wings Over Scotland has taken the plunge and invested in another electronic aid to help us stay that all-important one step ahead of the zeitgeist.

The SeeAhead Industries Predictamatic XF12 is the state of the art in digital foresight technology, and we put it straight to work to see if it could give us some advance knowledge of how Alex Salmond’s appearance at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon will turn out. The contents of the Device Output Log can be seen below.

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The fallout from HMRC’s rejection of the Rangers CVA has, of course, only just begun. Journalists and bloggers, us included, will be spending a considerable amount of time speculating wildly about the likely outcome of the club’s now-inevitable liquidation. So let’s quickly take stock of what’s fact and what’s guesswork.

(Please bear in mind that Wings Over Scotland is not a lawyer, and that your house may be at risk if you don’t pay tax on it for 20 years.)

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Rangers Football Club, formed in 1872, will formally cease to exist later this week. In a surprise development (in terms of its timing, not its content), HMRC have officially stated that they will reject the club’s proposed Company Voluntary Arrangement at the creditors’ meeting scheduled to take place this coming Thursday, June 14. The news was confirmed when the club’s administrators Duff & Phelps issued a press release stating their intention to go ahead with a plan to sell Rangers FC’s assets to a consortium led by businessman Charles Green for £5.5m.

There is, however, a great deal of debate about whether such  plan can go ahead. A fascinating blog by Scottish lawyer Paul McConville last week observed that HMRC had already put in place its own preferred liquidators should the CVA proposal be rejected, and it’s hard to see how Duff & Phelps can go ahead with the asset sale in the event of a legal challenge from creditors. Since HMRC has rejected the CVA and has its chosen liquidators standing ready, it seems highly likely that it, or some other creditor/s, would mount such a challenge.

There can be little doubt that the assets of Rangers FC – the playing staff and property portfolio, including Ibrox Stadium and Murray Park – ought to be able to realise significantly more than the £5.5m Green is offering. (Since the money Green proposed to use to buy the club with was in the form of a loan to be recouped from the survival and continued trading of the club, it’s also uncertain whether it’s actually on the table in any real sense.)

Even if the players’s contracts are held to be voided by the liquidation of the club (also the subject of debate) and they can move on without any transfer fees, it’s difficult to see how the property alone, even allowing for its partially- listed status, could fail to be worth at least double the supposed sale price, and the liquidators will be duty-bound to maximise the returns for creditors by at least opening the sale process up to competing bids, including those not seeking to use the property for football purposes.

Duff & Phelps and Charles Green have both insisted that despite liquidation Rangers Football Club will survive, under the same name, and continue to play at Ibrox. Such claims, stated by both parties as certainties, seem to lack any credibility. Further intriguing developments, we’re sure, are not far away.

Much as Scots have grown accustomed to trying to pretend otherwise, you'll probably have noticed that there's currently another international football tournament going on without us. This evening sees the first appearance in the European Championship of the England team, the only side competing in the entire competition who don't have a national anthem to call their own.

Over two decades of living in England hasn't changed this writer's feelings towards the country's international team much. I still want them to lose – not because I hate the English people, but precisely because I like them.

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Much as Scots have grown accustomed to trying to pretend otherwise, you’ll probably have noticed that there’s currently another international football tournament going on without us. This evening sees the first appearance in the European Championship of the England team, the only side competing in the entire competition who don’t have a national anthem to call their own.

Two decades of living in England hasn’t changed this blog’s feelings towards the country’s international team much. Generally speaking we still want them to lose – not because we hate the English people, but precisely because we like them (see below). In the case of Euro 2012, though, we’re going to make an exception.

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We couldn’t agree more. (Click to enlarge image.)

Thursday night’s Question Time from Inverness saw Johann Lamont once again trot out the line that the independence referendum doesn’t offer Scotland its only realistic chance of escaping Tory government for the forseeable future. Once again, the Labour quasi-leader insisted (56m 50s) that the choice between independence and the Tories was a false one, and that her party provided a genuine ideological alternative to the right-wing neoliberal philosophy which has dominated UK politics since 1979.

Unfortunately, that’s a lie. And the really troubling thing about it is that it means NOBODY is speaking for the majority of the British population, which almost certainly means that no mainstream political party is interested in representing your views. Which, you might think, is a pretty odd way to be running a supposed democracy.

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A surprise development today, as the moribund and long-neglected LabourHame website sprang suddenly back to life with its fourth post in as many months. And what a stirring comeback it was, as the party’s Shadow Secretary Of State for Scotland Margaret Curran launched into a vitriolic diatribe awkwardly entitled “Absurd to claim a separate Scotland would continue to be part of Britain“.

(There was plenty of room left in the headline to turn the car-crash grammar into English, for example by prefixing it with the words “Why it’s”.)

The centrepiece of the article’s argument was Curran’s unequivocal assertion that “Britain is the country we live in, not the island it exists on”, which is a claim only slightly spoiled by being completely factually wrong in every respect. Rather than waste all afternoon explaining why, we’ll just quote the Wikipedia entry and let you get on with your day. If you’re really pressed for time, you can stop after the first sentence.

“Great Britain or Britain (Welsh: Prydain Fawr, Scottish Gaelic: Breatainn Mhòr, Cornish: Breten Veur) is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, the largest European island, and the largest of the British Isles. With a population of about 60.0 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populous island in the world, after Java and Honshu. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west. Politically, Great Britain may also refer to the island itself together with a number of surrounding islands which comprise the territory of England, Scotland and Wales.

All of the island is territory of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and most of the United Kingdom’s territory is in Great Britain. Most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, as are their respective capital cities: London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

The Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the political union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland with the Acts of Union 1707 on 1 May 1707 under Queen Anne.”

You’d hope someone aiming to be the Secretary of State for a part of somewhere would at least have a grasp of the most rudimentary geopolitical facts about it, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Scottish Labour.

It’s been months since we freed an interesting piece of writing from behind a paywall, but this opinion column from today’s Times deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in the nationalist cause, and we can’t claim to be experiencing any great guilt about depriving News International of 0.0000001p in order to bring you it.

It’s an analysis of Ed Miliband’s bizarre “Englishness” speech yesterday (which gets odder and odder the more you examine it), and aside from making the lazy, clumsy but common error of asserting that Labour can’t win in England alone it’s a thoughtful and interesting piece highlighting the contradictions between Miliband’s assertions and depictions of Englishness and his Unionism. Read it below.

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Particularly alert readers will already have noticed an exciting new addition to the top of our links column in the last few hours – the Wings Over Scotland NewsWire.

Lacking a fully-staffed newsroom and having to go out and get the shopping from time to time, we can’t always cover every single interesting story that appears in the media straight away, and on occasion we don’t even have the time to knock together a quick round-up post. It’s appalling slacking on our part, obviously, but until someone invents a rent-free house we need to do some actual paid work now and again too.

So instead, inspired by Peter A. Bell’s excellent Referendum 2014 news-aggregating site, we’ve come up with the distinctly similar NewsWire, which is a supremely easy-to-use linkzine that’ll fill you in on interesting stories until we’ve got the chance to dig below the surface and analyse them properly. So a respectful tip o’the hat to Mr Bell (whose own page also remains worth checking regularly, because we and he will probably find different things interesting), and that’s about the size of that.

We would be lying if we said we were surprised by Johann Lamont’s line of attack at today’s First Minister’s Questions, but “dismayed, disappointed and depressed” would be a fair enough summary. With her finger as ever on the pulse of what really matters to the Scottish public, for some reason the Labour quasi-leader chose to repeat last week’s bewildering and incomprehensible assault about the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England. (Possibly because it garnered her some rare good press from the Unionist section of the Scottish media.)

The situation is in fact a straightforward one, which Lamont and Labour are doing their best to complicate and obfuscate in furtherance of their own agenda. The Bank of England – which despite the name is the central bank of the United Kingdom – is an independent body, and has been since Gordon Brown surrendered Government control of it in 1997. While the Treasury retains certain emergency powers, in all normal circumstances the Bank’s activities in respect of the UK’s monetary policy are determined by the MPC, which has no Government representatives on it.

(A minority of the committee’s members – four out of nine – are appointed by the Treasury, but are all external, non-political advisers.)

The SNP’s policy is that an independent Scotland would negotiate as part of the independence process a Scottish voice on the MPC (presumably an appointee along the same lines as those of the Treasury), given that Scotland currently “owns” 8% of the BoE. At present there is nobody on the Committee specifically tasked with representing the interests of Scotland, which is an entirely unsurprising and unsinister state of affairs – as a UK body, the Bank’s responsibility is to the UK as a whole, and at such times as Scotland’s interests might conflict with those of the wider UK, the Bank’s duty is clearly, quite properly, to act in the interests of the majority at all times.

Johann Lamont, and the Unionist cause in general, has gleefully seized on an uncharacteristically sloppy choice of words by Nicola Sturgeon during BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last month, in which she presented Scotland’s future representation on the MPC as axiomatic rather than merely a goal. Scottish representation on the Committee would in fact be the realistic and reasonable outcome of any independence negotiations, given both Scotland’s part-ownership of the bank and the simple realpolitik of the economics that would arise from the dissolution of the Union, but it’s clearly not a done deal and Sturgeon was careless to present it as one.

Nevertheless, that does nothing to obscure the inherent disingenuousness and dishonesty of the point Lamont has spent two FMQ sessions clumsily attempting to make. The fact is that Scotland has no form of representation now on the MPC, and (more crucially) as we noted two paragraphs above, the MPC has no duty to consider the impact of its policies on Scotland specifically – indeed, if anything it has the opposite responsibility. So even in the worst-case scenario of failing to secure any representation, Scotland would be no worse off independent than it is now.

Equally crucially, and more pertinently to what passes for Lamont’s argument, the same thing applies to the Treasury. In all situations, the duty of the UK government is to the whole UK, not to any individual region of it. Regardless of the nationality of a Chancellor Of The Exchequer, if faced with a decision where the interests of Scotland and those of the wider UK were to be somehow mutually exclusive, it is ALWAYS that Chancellor’s duty to decide in favour of the UK.

Once again, there is nothing evil or wrong about this. For as long as Scotland chooses to remain inside the Union, its national interests will and must rightly be subordinate to, and subsumed within, those of the UK. Lamont’s insistence that Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling or any future Scottish-born UK Chancellor would ever abdicate their responsibilites and act against the interests of the UK simply because they happened to be born in Scotland is insulting both to the men in question and to the intelligence of the nation. (It also borders on racist, but we’ll let that slide for now.)

By definition, then, Scotland CANNOT possibly have less influence over its monetary or fiscal policy should it become independent than it does within the UK, because it currently has – and must have – none at all. It is, not for the first time, embarrassing to watch Lamont peddle this fatuous, mendacious drivel on behalf of the ever-shrinking proportion of the Scottish people who still vote Labour. They deserve better.