Wings Over Scotland

We're sure that Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Unionist media en masse will once again line up to say that this is all just another bit of harmless fun banter and the sour-faced Nats really need to learn to take a joke. Right?

It's an extraordinary piece by Daily Telegraph leader writer Robert Colvile, following on from comments made by a former chairman of Conservative Future and current UKIP councillor, Tom Bursnall, and up-and-coming UKIP starlet Alexandra Swann, in which they suggested taking the vote away from the unemployed. Colvile's twist on the idea is that low-value members of the electorate be allowed to have a vote, but that richer people should get an extra one for every £10,000 in tax they pay.

(We're touched by the charmingly naive notion that rich people actually pay tax, and also by the choice of figures, which would imply that people earning £50,000 are no better in Colvile's eyes than filthy dole scroungers.)

Colvile's definition of low-value voters is "the unemployed, feckless and Scottish (I'm sorry if that's tautologous)", meaning that if a person is Scottish then it probably goes without saying that they're also unemployed and feckless. (Despite the fact that Scottish unemployment is lower than the rest of the UK, and Scottish employment is higher.) Yeah, we know – our sides are splitting too.

(The Telegraph, incidentally, has form on this. As recently as last year it ran another piece from a different writer also suggesting the unemployed shouldn't be allowed to vote, followed by an endorsement from the paper's deputy editor. It seems to be an idea that's gathering support.)

We look forward to the next rib-tickler. But for God's sake nobody suggest that any of this is "anti-Scottish", okay? We can't help but feel the Unionists would somehow manage to turn it into a call for Joan McAlpine to be sacked again.

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[EDIT 1.44pm: We discuss this in the comments but should probably add something above the line too for the sake of clarity. As our headline suggests, Mr Colvile's defence will likely be that his piece is intended as satire, based on the 1729 Jonathan Swift tract "A Modest Proposal…" and signified by the similar title. The words "modest proposal" also appear in the Ian Cowie piece from 2011. However, even if Colvile and Cowie, and the Telegraph's deputy editor Benedict Brogan also in 2011, were ALL attempting to satirise the absurdity of the idea – something about which we have very serious doubts, given the Telegraph's political ideology and the repetition of the "joke", which hangs entirely on people getting a pretty obscure reference which in Cowie's case is buried deep in the text – it would be a stupid and irresponsible act. The reactions in the comments on all the pieces show that to many Telegraph readers the notion is, unsurprisingly, not at all ludicrous. At the very, very best, the Telegraph's writers are shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a laugh, over and over again.]

A double whammy of upbeat happy thoughts from the Huffington Post today:

Stick with the Union and there's almost no chance of Salmond burning Holyrood down!

…but vote for independence and you WILL die of cancer. We're just saying.

This blog likes to think it can give credit where credit's due, so we have to take our hats off to the British establishment this week. Westminster has clearly been playing a far longer game than any of us had previously imagined when it comes to the threat of Scottish independence, and it's more than just successive Labour and Tory administrations suppressing the explosive McCrone Report way back in the 1970s.

Because it seems that Westminster has spent the last four decades (and possibly the last three centuries) cunningly sabotaging Scotland from within, with the intention of creating a Doomsday scenario whereby if the Scots should ever look like voting for independence, the UK Government can reveal the lethal Sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the country's economic prospects and terrify them back into line.

We have, of course, already been hilariously told that should an independent Scotland reject nuclear weapons, it would have to pay the multi-billion-pound costs of the rUK building replacement facilities to house them, despite the stunningly plain fact that as the sole property of the rUK, the Trident fleet would be entirely the rUK's problem. (And despite the fact that Scotland never asked for or wanted it in the first place.) The taxpayers of independent Scotland would also be likely to be left on the hook for billions more to decommission nuclear power stations built by Westminster.

But the latest outbreak of gunboat diplomacy from the Unionists is pointed menacingly at Scotland's very heart. The media is suddenly full of tales of a staggering £30bn bill to clean up the North Sea oil rigs when they finally stop production 30, 50 or 100 years from now, and apparently that invoice will be coming straight to Edinburgh too.

It's an odd notion, and one immediately undermined by the fact that despite the screaming headlines, the incomprehensibly vast sum wouldn't actually be an expense as such at all – it would supposedly take the form of tax relief to be offset against income tax receipts from the sale of the oil. Nevertheless, the can of worms opened up by this theory is almost infinitely deep.

The questions are numerous and obvious. Since the UK has been enjoying the benefits of the oil infrastructure for the last four decades and collecting 100% of the tax receipts, how could it possibly expect to get away without sharing the burden of the clean-up for a mess it created? How can you offset unknown future costs against present tax receipts anyway? What would be to stop an independent Scottish Government from simply changing its tax-relief rules 20 years from now? And most bafflingly of all, how in the world is it going to cost £30bn to shut down a few tiny outcrops of steel in a vast ocean in the first place?

There are a lot of oil rigs and related structures in UK waters – almost 500, in fact – but it's not like they're radioactive. They'll only be abandoned when there's no more oil (or very close to none) left to be pumped, so the risk of pollution would be negligible. They're hundreds of miles from shore anyway, and well away from shipping lanes. Even if they were to somehow explode they're not going to present any discernible danger to anything, and would burn out soon enough. To be blunt, given all the horrific other stuff we're doing to the environment anyway, what does it matter if we just pour concrete down the pipes, walk away and let them slowly rust into the sea?

We're being somewhat glib and simplistic, of course. But we can't for the life of us see how it could conceivably cost £60m+ to shut down each and every oil-industry installation – some of which are extremely small – in the North Sea. And there's a very good reason for that: it can't.

The Great Oil Clean-Up is just the latest in a long line of Unionist scaremongering myths. If you were to believe every piece of half-baked gibberish that's cropped up in the last 12 months alone, an independent Scotland would be crushed under a debt mountain beyond imagining. According to the London parties and the UK media, we'd be lumbered with £30bn in oil clean-up, a £140bn share of the UK deficit, perhaps £20bn to pay the rUK to move Trident, another few billion to build some defence forces from scratch, a few billion more for the nuclear power stations, £187bn in bailout money for the banks (because naturally we'd be responsible for the entire support of both banks, as they did have the word "Scotland" in their names), and of course the small matter of a whopping £1.5 trillion in liabilities for them as well.

That little lot, if we throw in a bit extra for inflation and all the other stuff that's bound to come up, comes to a kick up the kilt off £2 trillion – or for perspective, around 1,500% of Scotland's entire annual GDP. We would lead the world league table of proportional debt by a dizzyingly vast margin – the current runaway leader, Zimbabwe, has managed to rack up just 230%. (Even if we discounted the liabilities part of RBS and HBOS, cutting the total to around £500bn, we'd still be on about 400%.)

There are, clearly, two things we need to draw from these figures. Firstly, that they're complete cobblers. But secondly, if we were to imagine just for the fun of it that they were true, Scotland would be by far and away the poorest country on the face of the planet. And if that's what being in the Union for the last 300 years has brought us, you have to ask just how much worse a job of things we could possibly do by ourselves.

Nobody starts a blog because they want to. It’s time-consuming, it costs money, and it opens you up to all manner of hideous abuse. In my 20-year career as a professional journalist I’ve had my home address and home phone number published countless times, usually accompanied by implied or explicit exhortations for people to come round and kick my head in. I’ve been the subject of more than one hate campaign so prolonged, vitriolic and alarming that serious police intervention was required. I lost count of the death threats (some of them made to my face) years ago. And the sheer volume of venomous, hysterical name-calling and general rage that’s been directed my way would fill every page of the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica and more.

(I should note, in the interests of fairness, that if it comes to a flame war I’m no fainting violet myself, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. In the circumstances, sometimes you’ve just got to let off a little steam or you’d go completely mad. I have very little time for sites that get all prissy about a good honest ding-dong.)

This blog carries no advertising. I’m freelance, and every hour I spend researching, checking, writing and maintaining it is an hour when I’m not earning money to pay for the (extortionate) rent, the (crippling) utility bills and the (debilitating) weakness for imported salt’n’vinegar flavour KP Mini Chips. Like the vast majority of others, I mostly blog – to coin a phrase – not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but out of frustration at an unheard, unrepresented voice.

Wings Over Scotland arose for just that reason. I’d been searching for a while for a Scottish political blog that wasn’t abysmally written, appallingly designed, intellectually embarrassing or all three, and in 2011 I briefly thought I’d discovered it in an earlier version of Better Nation. That illusion lasted for the few hours it took to be summarily banned, without warning or explanation (and by person or persons still unidentified), from commenting on my own article. It was at this point I reluctantly acknowledged that I couldn’t count on being able to express my uncensored views on Scottish politics anywhere unless I took matters into my own hands.

The blog’s been running for five months now, and has seen a pleasingly rapid growth in readership – monthly page views are now in six figures, and monthly unique users well into five figures. (We note, curiously, that almost no other blogs reveal their traffic levels even to that degree.) In that time we’ve also become much more intimately acquainted with the rest of the Scottish online media, both professional and blogosphere, and a few interesting things have become apparent. And since today’s a bit of a slow news day, it seems as good a time as any to examine some of them.

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And better than ever.

Mmm, dinner.

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It's true, we are. This blog supports Scottish independence, and therefore usually finds itself at odds with the Scottish Labour Party and its elusive "leader" Johann Lamont. So when she was apparently released from the basement of John Smith House to speak at the launch of the Labour council-election campaign for Glasgow (though the evidence, supplied by Scottish Labour's own Twitter feed, was somewhat inconclusive), we didn't think it would be fair to report on the contents of her speech ourselves.

So instead, to ensure that Labour's positive policy prospectus for Scotland's biggest city gets impartial coverage, we're going to hand you over instead to the Scottish Political Editor of the Sunday Herald, the unimpeachably neutral Tom Gordon. Below is his full Twitter commentary on Lamont's speech as it happened. We have not edited Mr Gordon's tweetstream in any way. This is everything he said.

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As we browsed the papers this morning, naturally our attention was captured by the implausible-sounding headline "Rennie Hails Breakthrough At Launch Of Poll Campaign". Coming the day after a YouGov poll suggested the Liberal Democrats had suffered the indignity of falling behind UKIP in nationwide voting intentions, we were intrigued at the notion of a positive turnaround in their fortunes.

The story wasn't quite as exciting as it sounded, referring as it did to a local-council by-election in Inverness that the Lib Dems had captured from Labour in November 2011 (quite why the Herald feels it to suddenly be front-page news in April 2012 we're not sure), beating the SNP by seven votes. But as we casually skimmed the piece we were startled into alertness by the revelation that the election had been brought about by the conviction of the previous Labour councillor for benefit fraud.

Attentive readers can't have failed to notice that the Unionist parties and media have been on something of a witch-hunt against the SNP recently, particularly the party's councillors and prospective councillors as – quite coincidentally, we're sure – crucial local-government elections loom.

The best-known example is of course that of MSP Bill Walker, which we've documented at some length before, and who has been the recipient of far more media and political opprobrium for violent crimes he's alleged to have committed 20 years ago as a private individual (but strenuously denies and has not been charged with, let alone found guilty) than Scottish Labour MP Eric Joyce, who pleaded guilty to a number of violent drunken assaults committed while a serving MP (indeed, committed in the House Of Commons) yet remains the elected representative of the people of Falkirk.

But we've also had the bizarre case of Lyall Duff, a man hounded out of the party under concerted and suspiciously-timed media pressure – most notably from the Telegraph, the Scotsman and the Herald – for some frank but fairly innocuous comments made weeks ago on a private Facebook page which appears to have been hacked in order to view them, leading to the curious situation where none of the newspapers involved have actually printed any images of Duff's alleged comments, citing possible legal issues.

(It's curious because if the information was obtained lawfully, there can be no possible grounds to fear publishing it. If Mr Duff expressed his views in public, they're fair game to reproduce. If he didn't, the newspapers concerned are guilty of intercepting someone's private communications, which is a criminal offence.)

Yesterday the Scotsman whipped up another smear about an SNP councillor, this time a non-story about a non-existent conflict of interest with a company in administration, and today the lead story – that's the lead story – in its Politics section is an absurd and hysterical piece based around an article openly written by an SNP MSP in a newsletter and illustrated with a picture of her, but which (in addition to spelling her name wrongly) attributes her academic history to the wrong university. This error leads the Scotsman to bewilderingly describe the entire newsletter as a "fake leaflet".

Earlier this month the same paper prominently reported some rather feeble allegations of "ballot-rigging" by SNP members (in an internal candidate-selection process), and also ran with a story of another SNP councillor who'd apologised for making a tasteless joke. Attentive readers will note that the media rarely fails to include the word "SNP" in the headlines of articles like the ones we've listed in this piece.

But oddly, even though it only happened a few months ago, we couldn't remember reading of any Labour councillor being convicted of benefit fraud, which seemed strange as you'd imagine it was a bigger story than a badly-subbed newsletter or some sour grapes from an unselected council candidate. So we got our Googling hats on.

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The nationalist blogosphere is alive this weekend with talk of the recent BBC briefing at which several senior figures addressed an audience of the Corporation’s up-and-coming young journalists. The consensus view is that the recordings of the seminar reveal the BBC’s ingrained anti-independence bias – and indeed they do just that. But they do so in a way that’s both much less obvious and far more fundamental than most of the SNP supporters who’ve commented on them would have you believe.

You can watch the entire compiled recording above (the four individual sections with no syncing issues can be found here) and make your own mind up about what it demonstrates. But as our interpretation is rather at odds with that of most nationalists we’ve seen, we’re going to humbly offer it up for your consideration too.

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We’re probably all sick of the “Skintland” furore already. The sneering, condescending front cover of the Economist (coupled with a truly dreadful Photoshopped image of Alex Salmond inside which was oddly reminiscent of one on a campaign leaflet the Lib Dems had to apologise for and withdraw last year) achieved its aim of provocation, while the feature it purportedly advertised was an altogether more innoffensive beast, cobbling together some fairly bog-standard Unionist innuendo, supposition and misrepresentation amounting to nothing much that we haven’t heard a hundred times before, and which was excellently dismantled by Gerry Hassan.

The most interesting thing about the article was that it started with a preamble about the Darien Scheme, a 17th-century business venture which went horribly wrong and which anti-independence activists are very fond of bringing up as a stick to beat Scottish nationalists. This very week, for example, saw the publication (given much prominence by the Unionist media) of a report by Professor Malcolm Chalmers on the future of Scottish defence, in which the learned academic also felt it bafflingly necessary to cite the three-centuries-old events of the Darien adventure.

The Chalmers report was noteworthy not just for its politically-motivated conclusions, but also the emotive language and narrative of British nationalism running through it. We’ll deal with the report itself in more detail soon, but for this weekend’s in-depth feature we’re going to look at the theme of BritNat mythology, and in particular the re-writing of the story of the Darien Scheme to that end. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

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From the Scottish Football Association rules on Club Licensing (specifically  Part 3, Section 03 – The Club as Licence Applicant and the UEFA Licence). Emphasis ours.

"3.1.1 The Licence Applicant may only be a football club, that is the legal entity fully responsible for the football team participating in national and international competitions and which is the legal entity member of the Scottish Football Association (Full or Associate Member). The licence applicant is responsible for the fulfillment of the club licensing criteria. This membership must have been in place at the start of the licence season for a minimum period of three consecutive years.

[…]

3.3.1 UEFA Licence Awards for Scottish Premier League Clubs (SPL)
A Licence cannot be transferred from one legal entity to another."

NB: "UEFA Licence" does not denote a licence to compete in UEFA competitions, which are governed by an entirely different set of criteria. As the SFA website explains:

"National Club Licensing applies to Scottish FA member clubs and UEFA Club Licensing applies to Scottish Premier League clubs."

In other words, to play in the SPL you must have a UEFA Club Licence, regardless of whether you actually compete in UEFA competitions or not. (SFL clubs, who in normal circumstances wouldn't be expected to qualify for European tournaments, are dealt with separately via an "extraordinary procedure" in the event that they do.)

So, should Rangers FC be subject to liquidation and then reborn as a "newco", the new company would NOT be eligible for the licence required to play in the SPL, for at least three years. Furthermore, it is plainly and explicitly forbidden under SFA rules for such a licence to be transferred from one legal entity (Rangers FC) to another (New Rangers FC 2012). Well, that's that all sorted out, then. As you were.

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[Edited for clarity and latest versions of documentation, 13-4-2012]

[EDIT 17-4-2012: We rang the SFA yesterday, and they confirmed our interpretation of the rules above. Half an hour later they rang us back, sounding very nervous, and changed their line, stating that the UEFA Club Licence DID only apply to UEFA competitions, and only a National Club Licence was required to play in the SPL. Later that evening it was revealed that the Association is considering disbanding the SPL and SFL entirely and replacing them with a new National Football League. The SFA did not comment on the possible position of a newco Rangers in such a league.]

Picture special!

The world of Scottish soccer is in a ferment this week, and we use the word "soccer" quite deliberately. The two-part compound word "football" sticks in our throat, because the Scottish game has plenty of the first part but absolutely none of the second.

The reason for the sudden outbreak of sound and fury, which will ultimately signify nothing, is the revelation by the SPL of what the blogosphere is already calling the "Cheat's Charter". In itself it's actually a fairly innocuous document, and indeed could be portrayed as a crackdown. It proposes a raft of new penalties for teams going into administration or liquidation, with sanctions both on and off the field – a 75% reduction in monies paid by the League to the offending team for three years, and a 10-point deduction for two additional years following administration.

Since none of these punishments are currently part of SPL rules, one could not entirely unreasonably depict the changes (should they be agreed by the clubs in the meeting at the end of April) as a tightening-up of procedures. But equally rationally, the supporters of 11 out of the 12 SPL clubs are seeing them as something else entirely. Because what the proposed new rules do is explicitly lay down the route to a possibility which until now was only implicit – the return of a post-liquidation Rangers Football Club directly into the top flight of the Scottish game.

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