Wings Over Scotland

We’ve seen lots of UK media running stories about US satirist Jon Stewart’s mocking report on American coverage of the Diamond Jubilee, fronted by an extra-oily Piers Morgan. It’s pretty funny, but sadly everywhere we’ve seen it posted (except Gawker, which only has the first four minutes of eight) uses the same broken embedded stream, so you can’t actually watch it. Until now, that is.

YouTube’s fiendish software somehow knew that it was a clip of a copyrighted show and immediately threw a prissy little huffy-fit, which stops us embedding it here, but you can right-click on the image and download the video file, or just left-click to watch.

(We recommend the former for speed and convenience – if you choose to stream by left-clicking, there’ll be a pause of a few minutes while it buffers before playing.)

Enjoy some chuckles, and note with passing interest that to our cousins across the pond, the words “England” and “UK” are still interchangeable. Either that, or they have a surprisingly astute grasp of how little Scotland cares.

The independence referendum is roughly two and a quarter years away. (Remember how recently it was two and a half? Time flies when you’re having fun.) But two things that could happen within the next three weeks could do more to decide it than a thousand embarrassing TV “debates” or multi-million pound campaigns. For those of you in the heretic camp, we apologise in advance, because to find out why we’re going to have to talk about football some more.

This week sees the announcement of the final 18-strong Team GB football squad for the Olympics. We’ve already looked at the potential implications of any Scot featuring in the selection, although to be frank with just 18 players to be chosen we’ll be surprised if any make it on merit anyway, never mind the politics of the situation.

The other thing happening this month, of course, will be the SFA Appellate Tribunal’s reassessment of the club’s punishment on charges of bringing the game into disrepute. Or at least, it might – according to the Herald, Rangers haven’t yet ruled out a further appeal to the Court of Session:

“Rangers welcomed the verdict that the SFA were not in a position to hand down a signing embargo but may yet appeal the decision to return the case to the Appellate Tribunal, believing the case should instead be judged by a panel at the first stage of the process.”

It is extremely difficult to overstate how much such a course of action would enrage FIFA, who are already furious that civil law courts have been involved in the case at all rather than purely sporting ones. Were the Ibrox club to be insane enough to engage the CoS a second time, the international body would be likely to impose savage sanctions on the SFA, which could very well include the banishment of the Scottish national side from competitions.

The phrase “90-minute patriots” was coined as a slight on Scottish people whose sense of national identity was restricted to the duration of football matches. Nonetheless, there are a great many such people. This month, Team GB and Rangers FC between them could set in motion a chain of events which will bring about the end of Scotland as a footballing nation. In our view, such a scenario would turn the polling figures for the referendum round overnight. We’ll be watching with interest.

Wings Over Scotland had a staff outing to London this weekend. We went on Saturday to avoid the Jubilee crowds and the rain, with great success on both fronts – it turned into a beautiful hot summer’s day by the afternoon, and the city was as deserted as we’ve ever seen it. (The Underground, in particular, was eerily quiet almost everywhere, with empty platforms, tunnels and ticket halls as far as the eye could see. At times it was like a scene from 28 Days Later.)

Compared to the last time we found ourselves in the capital on the eve of a big Royal event, there was surprisingly little activity. Plenty of Union Jack bunting and flags littered the streets, but though we crossed the Thames several times, including by London Bridge and the Millennium Bridge, there were no enthusiasts camped out to stake their prime viewing places for the next day.

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Speaking as a professional journalist, the most flattering thing that can happen in your career is when major publishers pay you to write features. The second-best form of flattery is imitation, and at Wings Over Scotland we’re getting increasingly used to it.

Our more seasoned readers will recall examples such as the New Statesman’s enthusiastic “borrowing” of our popular Alex Salmond Dictator-Comparison Bingo piece, which they at least had the courtesy to acknowledge in print, albeit belatedly and after quite a lot of people shouting at them on Twitter. (It was such a good idea the Caledonian Mercury did its own tribute too.)

We’ve also been gratified to see other people finally picking up on the core and crucial observation about the nature of the independence referendum that we’ve been pushing since November 2011. (We won’t claim the credit for it being at the heart of the Yes Scotland campaign itself – we’re sure they knew it all along.)

Today, though, the thing we’re finding oddly familiar is a piece in Scotland on Sunday called “Will the SPL survive without Rangers?” The title and theme will ring an obvious bell with the over 20,000 viewers who’ve read our all-time most popular post, but the specifics are the really intriguing part, focusing as they do on the fact that several teams in particular wouldn’t be as badly damaged by the possible demise of Rangers as most of the media commentariat insists.

If we mention that the teams in question are Dundee United, Dundee, Hearts and Hibs, you’ll perhaps catch our drift. It’s nice to get paid for your analytical insight and research (and tracking down Dundee’s attendances from over half a decade ago was a tougher task than you might think) rather than just having other people take advantage of it, but setting the mainstream media’s agenda is at least some modest consolation.

Just a quick one, as we’re obviously very busy today putting out our Union Jack bunting and preparing our street party. Kenneth Roy of the Scottish Review, along with Peter “Moridura” Curran, is one of the Cranky Old Men of the nationalist movement, and we have to admit we often find his work rather hard going, for all its worthiness – not least because of the abominable, near-unreadable layout of the SR website.

It’s currently running a series (comprising an unknown number of parts) about the Lockerbie bombing, and the first piece was a bizarre, crotchety attack on the grammar of the Scottish Government’s official statement about the death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The second, however, which we link to in its slightly less eye-mangling reproduction on Newsnet Scotland, is unmissable.

If you’ve got Lockerbie fatigue, don’t worry – it’s only passingly about the events of that grim night in 1988. Instead, it sends out a powerful and damning message about democracy, and in particular the public accountability of governments to the people. The message could be summed up as “use it or lose it”, but if you read nothing else today we urge you to read Roy’s rather more evocative illustration.

Despite the launch of the rainbow-coalition Yes campaign on Friday, we’re still fighting the assertion that Scottish nationalism is both racist and bigoted – one typified by a recent article by George Galloway in the Daily Record.

I have to admit to a guilty soft spot for the MP for Bradford West. I know he’s ridiculous in many ways, but I like him. Watching George on Question Time recently, I knew he’d be entertaining and sometimes disrespectful. It’s a nice change from the grey men of politics we usually see. I like the idea that some politicians have the bottle to say and do pretty much what they want and sod everyone else. Not always pleasant and often enough to make your toes curl with embarrassment, George is, at least, a character and we could do with a few more like him in politics.

But as I read the article he wrote for the Record, in which he talked about seeing people who have “what can only be described as a virulent hatred of English people and a belief they are the source of Scotland’s troubles”, I began to wonder what country George was looking at.

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There’s a famous scene in the first Indiana Jones film where our hero, faced with a swordsman performing an elaborate duelling ritual prior to an anticipated bout of formal combat, simply pulls out a gun and wearily shoots him. (Inspired, no doubt, by the legend of the Gordian Knot.) We’re feeling a bit like that this morning as we peer into the bewildering, constantly-shifting looking-glass that is the affairs of Rangers FC.

Either of yesterday’s events would have been enough to try to untangle by itself, but the two smashed head-on into each other and created a grisly heap of tortured, twisted, smoking metal that’d take half a Scottish fire brigade all day to separate into identifiable components, and with about the same chance of anyone walking away intact. But we’re so stupid we’re going to have a go by ourselves. Read on, if you dare.

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Well, it’s safe to say it’s all kicked off big-time today, with not one but two massive developments in the Neverending (Rangers) Story. Firstly, you can read the entire CVA document for yourself here. But these are the bullet points:

1. The £8.5m Charles Green and his consortium (“Sevco”) intend to fund their purchase of Rangers with is in fact a loan, to be paid back (with interest) by 2020 [Section 4.20], despite Green’s previous pledge to run the club “debt-free”.

2. According to the BBC, Duff & Phelps’ fees during the period of administration to date are £5.5m, leaving just £3m in the pot for the creditors.

3. Highly unusually, the proposal doesn’t actually specify a percentage creditors will be paid. But Rangers’ current debts are in the region of £55m, meaning the maximum payout to unsecured creditors will be slightly over 5p in the £. The actual figure is impossible to gauge, as the CVA proposal document is full of unknown sums marked “TBC”, such as the amount owed to Craig Whyte. [Schedule 8]

4. Should Rangers lose the Big Tax Case the debt will at least double, but is widely thought likely to increase by even more, taking the total to around £150m. This would reduce the maximum payout to unsecured creditors to 2p in the £.

5. Should the CVA be rejected by creditors, Green has a contractual obligation to purchase the club’s assets for £5.5m (presumably again in the form of a loan, though this isn’t explicitly specified) and liquidate it, saving himself £3m. [Section 4.23] By coincidence the purchase price is exactly the sum quoted by the BBC for Duff & Phelps’ fees, leaving precisely £0 in the pot for creditors.

6. The creditors therefore have a choice between accepting a maximum of 5p in the £ (but likely much less than that), or getting nothing at all.

More coming as we unravel it. All we can say is that in a world where Robert Mugabe is about to be made a UN tourism ambassador and the head of the IMF doesn’t pay any tax, the notion of a bankrupt football club with £50m of unpayable debt and up to £100m more hanging over it BORROWING the money to pay off its creditors – by offering them an unspecified amount somewhere between almost zero and actually zero and expecting them to willingly agree to the deal even when one of them is the nation’s taxman – suddenly doesn’t seem all that insane by comparison.

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The media has been strangely silent today about the apparent missing of yet another deadline in the Rangers saga – yesterday was supposed to be the day Duff & Phelps actually sent out the mythical CVA proposal, but as yet there’s no public sign of it. Bizarrely, STV News reports that the document sent out to creditors doesn’t actually specify the percentage being offered, so we can’t see how it even counts as one.

It’s relevant because the CVA represents the only chance of Rangers automatically playing in the SPL next season, without having to beg the other 11 clubs to admit them directly as a newco – something that most commentators agree will happen anyway, on the grounds of self-interest. But just how well-founded is that belief?

As the fiasco drags on (and on and on and on), we’re constantly warned that the loss of the travelling Rangers support, among other things, will cripple the SPL’s smaller clubs. Many of the less-considered assertions of this claim centre on an inexplicable belief that should Rangers go out of business or be demoted to the SFL Division Three nobody would replace them, and that what would have been home fixtures for other SPL clubs against Rangers will be replaced by vacant Saturdays in a succession of empty, tumbleweed-strewn stadia.

But a reader comment on one story sent us scurrying off to our Big Book Of Scottish Football Stats again, and produced a surprising result.

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Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

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I’ve been a nationalist pretty much all my life, or at least since I was old enough to grasp the basic concept of politics (probably from about the age of 10 or so). Leaving aside any precocious notions of specific policies, I’ve never been able to grasp the basic concept of a people who consider themselves to be a nation being afraid to actually stand up and take responsibility for running that nation themselves.

If you think you’re a country, you shouldn’t be having foreigners pick your government for you. And if you don’t, you need to accept that you’re just a region with ideas above its station, and act accordingly – no more “national” football teams, no rugby teams, no flags, no anthems, no different laws or any of the rest of it.

To me, the idea goes far beyond anything so base as cowardice, and belongs instead in the realm of “simply too mad to understand”. It’s like not believing in gravity or evolution or the Earth being round and orbiting the Sun – that is, once someone’s pointed it out to you, it’s just a bit mental to keep disputing it.

Nobody can have two countries, or at least not simultaneously. You can be a citizen of somewhere, carry a passport for it, live there for as long as you like, or whatever else, but countries are like wives and livers – you can only have one at a time. You can change your nationality, if that’s what’s in your heart, but not have two at once. I’ve only agreed with Norman Tebbit about one thing in my entire life, and it’s that.

I’m Scottish. I’m British too, just like I’m from West Lothian and from Europe and from the Northern Hemisphere and plenty more things, but only one of them is my country. As such, I believe that it’s a self-evident truth that the government of Scotland should be chosen by the people of Scotland, and the people of Scotland alone.

But occasionally, just very occasionally, I have the misfortune to witness something like BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last night, and I’m not so sure we can be trusted.

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The Scottish media’s response to Friday’s launch of the Yes Scotland campaign in an Edinburgh cinema has been, as you might expect, extensive and varied.

Some of the coverage was dismayingly predictable, some of it rather more surprising.

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