Wings Over Scotland

We think our brains may have been completely fused by a story in today’s Daily Record, which is based around comments by Rutherglen Labour MSP James Kelly, pictured below in a scene from the particularly bad acid headache he’s just given us.

Here’s the bit that’s been making our minds spin round and round and round in circles this morning until we’re dizzy trying to make sense of it:

“ALEX Salmond was accused of “double standards” yesterday over his efforts to woo Rupert Murdoch. Labour raised further questions about the First Minister’s links with Murdoch following claims the media mogul lobbied Tony Blair to wage war in Iraq.

Former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said in the latest volume of his memoirs that Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us, etc”.

Salmond won plaudits across Scotland for his outspoken opposition to the war which he described as “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of recent times”. But it did not stop him from trying to get closer to Murdoch to win The Sun newspaper’s backing for the SNP.

Labour MSP and chief whip James Kelly said: “This could make the conversation a little uncomfortable the next time Alex Salmond has Rupert Murdoch round to Bute House for tea and biscuits. Alex Salmond was against the Iraq war but that didn’t stop him cosying up to Rupert Murdoch. This is classic double standards from Alex Salmond who is prepared to put his party’s interests ahead of any issue.””

Let’s try to talk our way through this slowly: LABOUR is attacking the SNP for not being sufficiently critical of RUPERT MURDOCH when he backed LABOUR Prime Minister TONY BLAIR over going to war in IRAQ in 2003? What, seriously?

That can’t really be it, can it? Labour, who instigated the illegal war that left hundreds of thousands dead, attacking an opposition party who voted against that war (and which actually tried to impeach Blair for it) for not being critical enough of a newspaper proprietor whose papers enthusiastically backed Labour at the time and who made Tony Blair godfather to one of his children, because when subsequently in government it had a couple of meetings with that newspaper proprietor (also one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers) the best part of a decade later?

Are we dreaming this stuff? Please tell us we’re dreaming it.

How’s that cross-party alliance for independence doing? Let’s ask the Scottish media!

GREENS
“Greens walk out on the Yes campaign” (Herald)
“Greens quash claims of ‘Yes Scotland’ walkout” (Holyrood magazine)

MARGO MACDONALD
“Margo MacDonald snubs ‘Yes Scotland’ campaign” (Scotsman)
“MacDonald ‘not leaving campaign’” (Herald)

SCOTTISH SOCIALISTS
“Yes Scotland heading for a right Royal bust-up as SSP break ranks” (Herald)
“As far as we are concerned we are fully part of the Yes campaign, and my attitude is that it has been a success.” (Herald)

Stay tuned for the latest developments!

New Rangers chairman (in both senses of that phrase) Malcolm Murray was fighting fire with petrol at the weekend as he embarked on a charmless offensive aimed at bullying other clubs into admitting the sort-of-new Ibrox club directly into the SPL. Murray (no relation, we think) has quickly rubbed everyone else up the wrong way with a series of boneheaded pronouncements portraying Rangers as victims and displaying not a hint of contrition, and it’s a tough call as to which has been the most crass.

We have a particular fondness for “There is no point in killing the patient while he’s trying to recover. Do that and the whole ward dies”, which shows a disturbing lack of knowledge about how hospitals work, on several levels. But it’s the sentence that came after it, in which Murray claimed that the other SPL clubs rejecting New Rangers would be a “suicide pact”, that’s perhaps the most eye-catching.

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We’ve been getting very confused today by the (New) Sunday Herald. Last night the paper’s “Investigations Editor” Paul Hutcheon tweeted that this morning’s edition would carry an “exclusive” on how a psychologist was telling the SNP to avoid using the word “independence”. Mr Hutcheon was clearly pretty excited about this breaking story, as he plugged it again a few hours later, and has gone on to tweet about it no fewer than 31 more times (figure correct at time of writing) during the course of the day.

But weirdly, this great “exclusive”, rather than being splashed all over the front page as you might expect, didn’t manage to make the online edition of the newspaper at all.

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We were intrigued by a piece we read on the Sunday Mail’s website today. It centred on last Thursday’s session of First Minister’s Questions, when Labour MSP Michael McMahon used (rather improperly) a constituency question to make a political attack on Alex Salmond. The FM slapped the question down, angrily noting that McMahon’s allegation about Salmond calling HMRC on behalf of Sir David Murray with regard to Rangers was categorically untrue, and later issuing a statement pointing out that his only call to HMRC came eight months AFTER Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte.

In the Mail’s story McMahon’s subsequent posture was full of bravado, insisting that he wasn’t about to apologise. “I stand by my comments and Alex Salmond knows they are true, as his response showed how much the truth gets under his skin”, he retorted, but what he said next demonstrated an admirably bold and inventive redefinition of the term “standing by my comments”. See if you can spot the difference.

FIRST MINISTER’S QUESTIONS VERSION:

“The First Minister was quick to call HMRC for his friend Sir David Murray“

“I STAND BY MY COMMENTS” VERSION:

“The First Minister has shown in the past that he is happy to come running to the aid of his bigwig friends when they are in trouble. For example, the way he tried to pressurise HMRC to apply special treatment in the wake of the damage caused to Rangers by his pal Sir David Murray.”

Keen students of the English language may have spotted a subtle alteration there. In the first version, Salmond was allegedly trying to use his influence for the benefit of Sir David Murray personally, on account of their supposed close friendship. In the second, the First Minister was allegedly trying to assist Rangers Football Club, owned by Craig Whyte, to recover from damage CAUSED BY Sir David Murray.

(This would presumably imply that Salmond was also a friend of Craig Whyte, an assertion which must be sailing fairly close to defamation in the current climate. And since Murray has repeatedly publicly claimed that both he and Rangers were “duped by” Whyte, it’s rather stretching the bounds of plausibility to imagine that Salmond could have been helping Whyte at Murray’s behest or on his behalf.)

Wings Over Scotland would like to applaud Michael McMahon for his bold and courageous refusal to back down on this issue, and that furthermore we’re standing by those comments when we point out that in fact he’s a contemptible liar who even lies about his lies in an impressive illustration of the fine art of meta-lying, in order to cover up what was in reality a weasel-worded and entirely craven retraction of them. And you can, or possibly can’t, quote us on that.

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From this morning’s Telegraph: the Union option.

From this morning’s Sunday Herald: the independence option.

The Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour back option 1. The pro-independence parties (SNP, Greens, Socialists, Solidarity) all back option 2. It’s up to you.

Alert viewers may have already noticed a new addition to the central links column: The Sealand Gazette. (If so, they should award themselves 200 Alert Viewer Points and add them to their Viewerscore card.)

The Gazette came about because I have a bad habit of using Twitter as a sort of Post-It Note for news stories I want to keep on file for future reference. It is, of course, singularly badly suited for this purpose, because finding anything you posted on Twitter more than a couple of days ago is a hideous trial and – as I learned only recently – Twitter deletes your old tweets forever when you exceed your quota, which varies according to how prolifically you tweet but can be as little as a few weeks.

So instead, now there's the Gazette, the newspaper for people who increasingly wish they lived on an isolated former gun platform in the middle of the North Sea. Published through the rather nifty Scoop.it platform, the benefits are that it's incredibly easy to use – a couple of clicks adds a story – and both persistent and searchable.

(NB To search the Gazette use the "FILTER" function below the banner, not the Search box at the top of the page, which searches the whole of Scoop.it instead.)

At launch many of the stories are old-ish, because I've been going through my Twitter account grabbing everything I've posted there since April before it gets wiped, but from now on it'll be hot-off-the-presses stuff, and there's even a Page Three girl today as an introductory bonus. (Though of course, it's a rather sinister and troubling one.) Readers can also easily suggest stories to add.

The Gazette should be a lot less trouble to maintain than the short-lived "Reasons Not To Recycle" blog, and fulfil much the same purpose. (Misanthropic nihilism, essentially.) But I'll make a special effort to throw in a few nice stories too, because mass reader suicide isn't the goal. Although in the broader sense, it is a bit.

When you’re a journalist, it’s not uncommon to see your work hacked to bits in the time between being emailed to the commissioning editor and appearing in print. We long ago lost count of the number of times we’ve had vital explanatory passages chopped out leaving subsequent sections orphaned and incomprehensible, or the number of abominable, remedial-level grammatical errors and typos we’ve had inserted into our immaculately-proofed copy by a hapless young sub-editor from the generation when schools gave up teaching kids how to spell.

One of the most annoying things, though, is seeing your stuff go out with a headline that bears no relation to what the piece was supposed to be saying. It happens to the great and the good as much as to cub reporters and journeyman hacks – star Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker and the Independent’s high-profile political/feminist writer Laurie Penny have both suffered in recent weeks – and it drives writers crazy.

So we were only mildly startled to be browsing this morning’s Scotsman and see this:

The article itself features the words “independent” or “independence” six times, and mentions the concept of “separation” only once, in the sentence “This isn’t exactly the separatist fanaticism painted by some opponents”. That sentence is fairly obviously a critical reference to the Unionist camp’s dogged use of the word “separation” as a pejorative, intended to imply isolation, parochialism and xenophobia.

Hassan’s piece isn’t a partisan call to arms for either side, nor even one about the language of the referendum debate, but a calm, considered plea for a much wider, non-political, mature discussion of the sort of Scotland we want to see in the future (ie the same article Gerry’s been writing over and over again for the last year or more).

We can’t say with absolute 100% certainty that the article’s headline – which takes a sledgehammer and pneumatic drill to that happy notion and smashes it to a pile of ironic rubble – is indeed the work of the Scotsman (we’ve asked Gerry and await reply) but at this point we’d be happy to have a tenner on it.

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If you’re anything like us, you’ll have been frustrated by most media coverage of the Rangers liquidation saga, and in particularly the failure of journalists to ask the questions that ordinary people are asking over and over again on Twitter and internet messageboards, or just shouting at the telly.

So we were hugely impressed when professional insolvency practitioner Maureen Leslie of MLM Solutions, who has recently appeared on both Newsnight Scotland and Reporting Scotland in connection with the Rangers case, held an online Q&A on the subject today (along with the company’s senior manager Allan McLeod), devoting over an hour of her valuable time to answering questions from clueless members of the public such as ourselves.

Below is an edited transcript of the proceedings (leaving out questions that were outwith MLM’s expertise). We haven’t changed the content of any questions or answers, but have corrected typos, occasionally made slight adjustments to wording for clarity, and grouped questions on the same aspects of the situation together. (Suspicious readers can view the original unedited webchat in full here.) We hope you’ll find it as informative and enlightening a resource as we do.

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First, a disclaimer-stroke-apology: Wings Over Scotland isn’t a football blog. But as we’ve said before, in our opinion the fate of (The) Rangers FC will have a far greater influence on the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum than anything Johann Lamont will ever say or do in her life (something which certainly applies to her current pitiable carping about BSkyB), so we have to look at the bigger picture, and today that means talking about Rangers again.

It’s fair to say that Walter Smith’s intervention in the affair yesterday morning really put a tiger among the turtledoves. Rangers fans unsure about giving Charles Green their full backing – but ultimately likely to bite the bullet and go along with him for want of any alternative – had a new straw of hope, and wasted no time in clutching at it, as the influential Rangers Supporters Trust immediately asked fans not to buy season tickets unless Green stood aside to make way for Smith’s consortium.

The move places another obstacle in front of Green turning his newco Rangers into a viable business, to add to the many challenging ones he already faced – particularly hanging onto the playing and coaching staff (including manager Ally McCoist, whose departure would surely scupper any chance of supporters getting behind Green) and successfully negotiating entry into the SPL. But unlike most of the media, which is this morning reporting the Smith group’s succession as all but inevitable, we’re not sure Green will be all that concerned.

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We’ve been having a little poke around in the insolvency laws today, and we have to inform Wings Over Scotland readers with shame and regret that we made a mistake in our Rangers Liquidation FAQ a couple of days ago. It turns out that it is in fact permissible for a new company to take over the name of an old one, so long as the old company was purchased in the process of liquidation, an exemption which would seem to clearly apply in the case of Rangers.

In the light of bizarre and intriguing recent developments, then, we’re faced with an interesting prospect: a new Rangers FC, playing next season under the old name, in the old colours, with the old history, in the SPL, at Ibrox Stadium, led by Walter Smith, with the current playing squad, completely free of debt and with a £20m bank balance from season ticket sales. (After paying back the bargain-basement purchase price.)

One can only imagine the tone of triumph from the Govan club’s friendly supporters.

The Big Tax Case would be irrelevant, buried with the oldco, as would the SFA investigation into dual contracts and the punishment for bringing the game into disrepute. Tens of millions of pounds owed to the taxpayer would simply disappear in a puff of smoke, as would the millions owed to other football clubs, to Ticketus, and to hundreds of smaller creditors for whom the money could (and now will) be the difference between their business surviving and dying.

The new Rangers wouldn’t be eligible to play in European competitions for three years, but business would otherwise carry on exactly as it did last season without interruption. It doesn’t seem much of a punishment for 10 to 20 years of deliberate, blatant, industrial-scale cheating, robbing other clubs of tens of millions of pounds and driving the Scottish game to the brink of destruction in the process, does it?

The above is, of course, a best/worst-case scenario according to which side of the debate you’re on. Even if the new Rangers could secure an 8-4 Yes vote to their entry into the SPL, the SFA could apply conditions and sanctions, as could the other clubs in return for their vote. But the new Rangers could always renege on any promises it made (eg in respect of agreeing to a change in SPL voting rules or sharing TV money), and it could challenge any SFA conditions in the civil-law courts, were the SFA to be so toothless as to let them get away with doing it previously.

The press is reporting that the attitudes of several of the the other clubs in the top division is hardening against the notion of admitting the phoenix Rangers directly to the SPL. In the circumstances we can’t say we’re surprised.

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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