Wings Over Scotland

We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange this week with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green leader (sorry, “co-convenor”) Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the he-said-we-said in too much depth (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation took in the comradely and left-wing-solidarity-building, if somewhat distant from reality, assertion that “the Green Party make Salmond look like Thatcher“ before culminating in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, the obvious thing that might strike a passer-by would be that the Greens appear to be massively overplaying their hand from the off. They might claim their complaints are about a “democratic” process, but they speak for just 4% of the Scottish electorate, and even among those backing independence they’re a tiny (9%) minority. Democracy has spoken already, and it wasn’t for the policies of the Greens.

(Nor those of the Scottish Socialist Party, who have also offered the media a chance to portray division in the Yes camp over their policies that an independent Scotland must be a republic rather than a monarchy, and be outside of NATO – although the latter in fact remains SNP policy too anyway.)

Clearly, none of that means that they need to shut up and just go along with what the SNP says – the whole point of independence is to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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The official launch of the Yes campaign for the independence referendum takes place tomorrow. We imagine it’ll be a substantial and considered affair. But what it will amount to over the next two years is nothing more and nothing less than the image below. Obviously we can’t do art for toffee, but you get the general idea.

We’ve gone on at some length on this blog (and elsewhere) about how the referendum isn’t for deciding whether Scotland is a republic or a monarchy, whether we’re in or out of NATO/the EU, whether we use the Euro or the Pound or something else entirely, how many ships we need in our navy, which taxes we’ll raise and/or cut, or any of the rest of it. The purpose of the referendum is to decide one thing and one thing only: who elects the future governments of Scotland.

The five counties of South-East England (Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Essex and Greater London) are home to just under 14 million people, compared to the fractionally over 5 million of Scotland. Even if we take Greater London out of the equation, the other four still add up to a population a million higher than Scotland’s.

Those four counties voted so overwhelmingly Conservative in the 2010 general election that they returned 62 Tory MPs from 66 seats – enough Tories alone to outvote the entire bloc of Scottish MPs of all parties (which will soon be even smaller, falling from 59 to just 52). Greater London, despite its large concentration of extremely poor urban areas, still returned another 28 Tories, along with 38 Labour and 7 Lib Dems.

So in the South-East as a whole, even including the huge relative Labour stronghold of London, that’s 90 Tories to 38 Labour, plus 11 others – an overwhelming majority of almost two to one even if you count everyone else as anti-Tory. (If you count the Lib Dems alongside their coalition partners, it’s an even more terrifying 100 to 39.)

But really, the picture tells the story for itself. A small, overwhelmingly Tory corner of England vastly outmuscles the whole of Scotland when it comes to deciding the UK government. (The dark shaded area supplies almost a quarter of all the MPs in the Commons.) We can either face the reality that we get whatever government Kent and Sussex and Essex and Surrey want, or we can choose our own. However much the desperate Unionists try to muddy the waters, it really is as simple as that.

A curious phenomenon occurs when debating the issues of independence with those of the Labour party – one that was highlighted again in the debate published on this site last week. Labour constantly repeats the mantra of being “stronger together” and asserts that the SNP only cares about a poor child in Glasgow but not about a poor child in Bradford, citing this as a reason to maintain the Union.

(Quite why the Scottish National Party would ever be expected to concern itself with the sovereign affairs of England is a question we’ll leave for another day.)

The “solidarity” narrative insists that both issues must be tackled at the same time, and that it would be unfair to focus on only one of the children while failing to provide the same attention and resources to the other. In order to show solidarity, the fate of both children must be tied to that of the worst-off, and if the fortunes of both cannot be improved then neither should be.

(For some reason this narrative doesn’t usually extend to covering children from Istanbul or Delhi. There’s no discernible intent among Labour activists to create a European superstate so that all deprivation can be addressed simultaneously. The party appears to apply double standards for the UK and the rest of the world, only serving to highlight its British-nationalist ethos rather than any commitment to a global brotherhood of man.)

By way of illustration, imagine that (Heaven forbid) you find yourself in a lifeboat in the immediate aftermath of some terrible maritime disaster, and there are two groups of children in the water. The lifeboat can only accommodate one of the groups, and so a decision must be made which to save. At present the boat is captained by the SNP, who are intent on plucking the nearest of the two groups from the ocean and moving them to safety. Within the lifeboat, however, there are also Labour politicians who insist that as they cannot save all the children, it would be selfish and unfair to save only a few, and that therefore in order to show “solidarity” the lifeboat should pick up no children at all, leaving all to drown or succumb to hypothermia, comforted only by the identical fate of their companions.

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Below is an open letter released today by the 42 signatories identified at the bottom. Wings Over Scotland endorses its contents, and urges its readers to republish and propagate the text as widely as possible by all available means.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has now died without having been able to clear his name of the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 on the 21st of December 1988 during his lifetime. Now all those politicians and Megrahi-guilt apologists who regard compassion as being a weakling’s alternative to vengeance, who boast of their skills at remote medical diagnosis, and who persistently refuse to address the uncomfortable facts of the case, will doubtless fall silent. Finally, the ‘evil terrorist’ has been called to account for himself before a ‘higher power’.

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Today, Johann Lamont – someone elected by nobody except the people of Pollok in Glasgow – took it upon herself to apologise on behalf of the people of Scotland for the early release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a man who may or may not be responsible for 270 deaths in and over Lockerbie, but who most definitely spent the past three years in absolute agony and being kept alive by totally artificial means by a Libyan government determined to use him for propaganda purposes.

That a country could see fit to release a dying man on compassionate grounds is something to be proud of, especially in comparison to the sort of blood-lust demanded by those across the Atlantic. As such, I was utterly disgusted by Lamont’s comments – they were arrogant, they displayed contempt, and ultimately they serve only to undermine the whole principle of human compassion. So, to stop myself bursting a blood vessel, I decided to send her an email.

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Because, y’know, it wasn’t Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who died today.

Perhaps one day we’ll know the truth, though.

As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here's some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you're a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

Maybe you’re a Hearts fan (or a Chelsea one), and you’re not sure whether you’re still a bit drunk and imagining things or not, so allow us to clear something up for you.

No, you’re not dreaming. This actually happened. Tragically, this is really the picture that Scotland’s LEAST moronic newspaper thought most appropriate to illustrate their story on the imminent launch of the “Yes Scotland” campaign. (And, indeed, as the front-page lead of the entire website.) We’re not joking. We imagine the Daily Record is lining up Russ Abbott in a Jimmy hat and Rab C Nesbitt even as we speak.

We seriously can’t imagine how ashamed anyone with even the last shred of an ounce of conscience who works for the Herald must be today. Please, readers – don’t berate and chastise these poor, fearful souls. Take pity on them, for their dignity is ruin’d.

As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here’s some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you’re a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

Is this actually worse than bags of peanuts with "WARNING: MAY CONTAIN NUTS" on them and the like? In some senses, I think, it might be.

It’s been a while since our first Straight Debate and we’d hoped to have had more by now, but it’s surprising how many Unionists (nearly all of them) aren’t prepared to have a simple and open discussion. Duncan Hothersall, though, is one of the most prominent and hardcore online Labour activists in Scotland. We’d been badgering him to take up the cudgels for ages, and last week he finally agreed. This is how it went.

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As part of our continuing look at the people who haven’t yet their minds up about independence, we’re delighted to present this piece by Sue Lyons. If you’re a “Don’t know” too, we’d love to hear from you – why not drop us a line?

I am a mum and a wife. In point of fact, I’m an English wife married to a Scottish husband, with three English children from my first marriage and two Scottish children from my current marriage. Why would I even bother to mention that at all, you might wonder – surely it doesn’t matter where my children were born, surely I love them just the same? And you would be right.

What makes it worth mentioning is that my husband is a Scottish nationalist. In fact, he’s such a Scottish nationalist that were the UK government to say tomorrow “You can have independence for Scotland but you have to pay for it yourself”, he would say, “Where do I sign?”

He describes himself as “rabid” and he’s absolutely right – if you cut off his leg he would have a saltire running through it like a stick of rock (but not Blackpool rock, because that’s in England). Not for him the sitting on the fence that others might do, not for him the idea that you can vote for the SNP and yet still be undecided on independence. John is for an independent Scotland completely and absolutely. That sometimes causes fun and games in our own personal Union – our home.

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