Wings Over Scotland

I'm often struck by the ability of the Unionist parties to switch their narrative back and forward on the hoof. They showed not the slightest shame or equivocation, for example, in the way they flipped overnight on the 6th of May 2011 from saying that there should never be a referendum on independence, particularly at times of economic crisis, to the emphatic insistence that there must not only be such a referendum, but that it must happen immediately. Labour opposed the Council Tax freeze and supported tuition fees, only to wake up one morning last spring and decide to swap those principles over, instantly campaigning for the new reversed positions as if they were lifelong principles.

But today's reaction to the news that Scotland's economic output almost precisely mirrors that of the UK as a whole, and is in fact the second most-productive region of the country after the South-East of England, provides us with a particularly good example. Having spent most of the last seven months doggedly trotting out the "too wee, too poor, too stupid" line and urging Scots to stick with their benevolent Southern neighbours without whose financial assistance an independent Scotland would be an economic basket case, suddenly the fact that the Scots more than pull their weight is evidence that the Union is working for us.

It's an odd spin on the figures. For one thing, these numbers are merely relative – the fact that Scotland is doing as well as the UK isn't in itself saying much, as the UK is currently one of the world's most indebted nations, requiring brutal surgery to try to balance the books. Secondly, the stats clearly show that Scotland is indeed subsidising most of the UK, rather than the other way round. Given that there are ten times as many people in that area as in Scotland, it doesn't take an arithmetical genius to work out that were all of Scotland's output to stay within her borders, it would make a huge positive impact on the country's economy. If you go out to dinner and you pay for ten other people's starters, that's an awful lot of money you could otherwise have spent on your own pudding and drinks.

(The elephant in the room is of course London, which generates 171% of the national average GDP. But since most of that is accounted for by the machinations of the City – which bring benefit to nobody but themselves – it's a rather false picture, rather like hacking one of your legs off and proudly turning up at Weight Watchers proclaiming that you've shed a stone and a half in a week. We wouldn't be all that surprised if it turned out that the Bank Of England's creation from thin air of hundreds of billions of pounds of imaginary money counted towards London's GDP, for example.)

GDP isn't a very reliable guide to anything*, but in so far as these figures show anything they demonstrate that Scotland has absolutely no economic reason to fear independence. Nevertheless, we keenly await the next set of stats which can be spun to suggest otherwise, so that the FUDs can once more switch seamlessly from proclaiming Scotland's happy equal partnership in the Union to dire fearmongering about how we're underperforming subsidy junkies who mustn't dare try to go it alone. We're sure it'll be along in a matter of days.

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January 3rd is our favourite day of the year. Lovely though the extended break is (and thanks very much to the surprisingly high numbers of you who kept visiting the blog while we sat back and stuffed ourselves with mince pies and Crabbies Mulled Ginger Wine for most of a fortnight), there’s nothing quite like cracking the wrapper off a whole shiny 12-pack of sparkling freshly-baked months, full of potential and that great new-year smell. Sadly, though, you can always rely on Scotland’s proud Unionists to come along and let off a few rancid trouser-coughs into the room.

In 2012, they’ve kicked off with a particularly bizarre brace of Christmas-sprout-fuelled rotten gas expulsions. First, prolific Tory blogger and pundit David Torrance let off a rather spiteful blast of foul air at Alex Salmond in response to the string of garlands festooned on the First Minister far and wide by the political media in 2011. Making the faintly astonishing claim that Salmond had had “a disappointing year”, Torrance attempted to back the assertion up by calling His Eckness’ personality into question, highlighting the intemperate attack on the Supreme Court and, er, not much else.

Having painted the FM as a ranting, all-smearing loose cannon, Torrance immediately backtracks and portrays the SNP’s first seven months of majority government as a policy “damp squib”, with Salmond now described as a “safety-first” conservative who doesn’t really want to rock the boat, who “just wants to be loved” and who “has curiously little to say”. Quite how Torrance squares this impression with the explosively controversial passing of the anti-sectarianism legislation, the return of the contentious minimum-pricing bill and the backing of gay marriage in the face of bitter opposition from churches (in particular the Catholic church, whose voters the SNP had only finally wrenched away from Labour in 2011) is something we’re at a loss to explain.

(We did try politely asking him to, via the Steamie’s comments, but our contribution was mysteriously declined.)

Torrance’s sour personal assault on the First Minister, though, paled into insignificance beside an extraordinary piece from Labour’s Ian Smart, which also span off from the Times awarding Salmond the Briton Of The Year title in December.

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It’s been a pretty big year for WoSland, with average traffic more than doubling in the year, all previous individual records smashed, a new name, a spinoff site and a fancy redesign bringing your favourite modern culture chronicle visually into something approaching the 21st century. We’ve slacked off a bit in December on account of some exciting videogame-development commitments and the holidays and stuff, but rest assured we’ll be back in full effect in the New Year. Meanwhile, here are the old year’s top 20 features (ranked in order of most views) in case you missed any of them.

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…according to today’s edition of The Times, is Alex Salmond. If you were wondering:

“We are fully aware of the irony of awarding this title to someone who does not believe in the idea of Britain itself.”

You can read the full story below.

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The lawyer and Labour activist Ian Smart has had a few strong things to say in the last couple of weeks, not least a coruscating attack on the poor quality of the Scottish party’s leadership candidates. But the piece that caught our eye was one last Monday which was ostensibly about the EU and Eurozone crisis. Commenting relatedly on the internal machinations of the last Labour government, Smart said:

“Any time Blair did anything really unpopular Gordon’s people would let it be known that he would have done things differently. They were careful never to say what they would actually have done, just that it would have been something different. Thus, that ‘something different’ could be whatever you wanted it to be… if the leader of the Labour Party wants to become Prime Minister then he or she will require to win a General Election. And that requires an ability to answer the question ‘What would you do?’ with something more than ‘something different’.”

And yet, when we look at Smart’s party in Scotland, what clearly-specified, active policies do we find that it presently stands for (rather than just against)?

– on the constitution? “Vote for the status quo and we’ll change things at some undetermined point in the future, in some unspecified way or ways (even though we’ve just finished spending several years on the Calman Commission supposedly coming up with a settled and lasting position on devolution).”

– on local taxation? “We’ll get back to you on that.“

– on higher education funding? “We haven’t made a decision yet.“

– on fighting sectarianism? “We refuse to participate in the discussion.“

– on minimum alcohol pricing? “We’re for doing something, but not this.“

– on gay marriage? “The time is right to consult on options.“

– on maintaining/upgrading nuclear weapons? “No comment.“

– on building a new generation of nuclear power stations? “We haven’t ruled new nuclear power in, but neither have we ruled it out.“

Help us out, readers (or Mr Smart, if you’re there) – is there anything Scottish Labour and its new leader actually DOES currently have a policy on?

The political grouping in Scotland comprising Federalists, Unionists and Devolutionists finally said goodbye to its old figurehead at the weekend, as Labour bid farewell to Iain Gray and welcomed Johann Lamont as its new leader.

We shall miss the man so memorably and tellingly dubbed “Elmer Fudd” by the estimable and much-missed (he hasn’t died or anything, but barely seems to write anything for anyone any more) Rab McNeil, and by way of tribute we present not his most legendary appearance on Newsnight Scotland (for he wasn’t Labour’s leader at that time) but our favourite quote, from six minutes and 20 seconds into a session of First Minister’s Questions in March 2011, six weeks before the election with Labour still 15 points ahead in the polls:

“After 92 times at this, you would think the First Minister would have realised by now that I get to choose what the questions are about. But his turn is coming soon enough!”

We wish you more luck at hunting wascally wabbits, old friend.

Johann Lamont's speech to Labour at the announcement of her victory in the leadership elections had a number of quite interesting soundbites in it. But one in particular leapt out at us. At 3m 55s, Lamont spoke of:

"…people who want to build a prosperous Scotland that can pay its own way, a wealth-creating Scotland."

Note the future tense ("want to") there. For such a Scotland to require building, it must not currently exist. In other words, Lamont believes the narrative of the right-wing English Tory press that she lives in a Scotland which is a subsidy junkie, reliant on the munificence of England to survive, a parasite on the wealth of others rather than a nation which creates its own. That's a view she shares with Margaret Thatcher, who infamously told the Times in February 1990 that "We English, who are a marvellous people, are really very generous to Scotland."

We do not recognise that Scotland, either in the present or the future. If that's what Johann Lamont (who represents a deprived area of Glasgow ruled by Labour for most of the last century) believes to be the case, then we understand more clearly her terror of independence. But we share neither her vision nor her fear.

The illusion lasted almost six minutes.  At 1m 47s into her victory speech, new Labour leader Johann Lamont offered a stirring pledge:

"While I am leader, nothing will be off limits. There will not be one policy, one rule, one way of working which cannot be changed".

But as the speech wore on, there wasn't a single sign that any of them actually would. And at 7m 30s, when Lamont reached the matter of the constitituon, Scottish Labour's line in the sand had concrete poured into it and an electric fence planted on top. Demanding (impotently) that the SNP bring forward the referendum immediately, and that it should comprise just one question, Lamont declared:

"Separation and devolution are two completely different concepts which cannot be mixed together."

For a start, it's an obviously nonsensical sentence. The two concepts are inherently bound up with each other – if you devolve, say, control of the health service from Westminster to Scotland, then you are inescapably "separating" the NHS into two discrete parts. All and any devolution is by its very nature a subset of independence, and an empirical (although not necessarily chronological) step towards it.

Lamont then laid out her position – Scots should be made to choose starkly between independence and the status quo, but if they chose the latter Labour would promise them more powers. Which powers? We don't know. When would they be delivered? We weren't told. And how would Labour get itself into a position to make good on even that vague promise in the first place? That's the question nobody has an answer for.

Kenny Farquharson in Scotland on Sunday was the first to say it:

"I’m sorry, but this 'jam tomorrow' approach won’t do. We have been here before. In 1979, as Scotland prepared to vote in the first devolution referendum, former Tory leader Alec Douglas-Home urged Scots to vote No, promising that the Tories would come up with a better form of home rule afterwards. Of course, when No.10 became Maggie’s Den, that prize proved illusory. Scots are unlikely to fall for a Labour version of the same pitch."

But it seems to be the pitch Lamont is going to try to sell. Rather her than us.

So the new leader of Scottish Labour (or as some would have it, the first true leader of "Scottish Labour") is Johann Lamont, with Anas Sarwar as her deputy. The result came as no surprise to those of us who 12 hours earlier had spotted Henry McLeish giving the game away in the Scotsman by saying "the new leader should not put all her political eggs in one basket", but the nature of the result is the intriguing thing.

Lamont actually lost the popular vote within the Labour membership to Ken McIntosh. She won by securing a far greater share of the trade-union section of Labour's electoral college, taking 21% to McIntosh's 8%, in order to win the overall race by 52% to 40% (with dear old Tom Harris trailing in last with an embarrassing 8%). Why is that intriguing? Because the trade union vote isn't restricted to Labour members, voters or supporters. Anyone who's in a trade union, even if they're members of the SNP (or the Tories or the Lib Dems or anyone else) could vote in the leadership election.

The bare electoral arithmetic suggests that SNP voters make up a very large chunk of trade union membership, quite possibly even a majority. Could it be that they all voted for Lamont (knowing Harris couldn't win) as a deliberate act of sabotage against Labour? We'll never know. But it's interesting to think about, isn't it?

The internet is currently abuzz with rumours that the Tories plan to call a general election next March. We're not quite sure if such a thing would even be legal – the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 doesn't seem to actually come into effect until 2015, as far as we can gather from a staggeringly superficial skim – but WoSland is going to EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that it won't happen, and here's why.

Chris Terry of Britain Votes posted a series of tweets today which raise some fascinating points. Firstly, the polls are currently very close – the Tories just moved two points ahead of Labour this week – so a hung Parliament would be almost inevitable. Secondly, everyone expects the Lib Dems to be massacred if an election is held any time between now and 2055. And thirdly, the SNP are riding spectacularly high in Scotland at the moment – the last poll, published a few days ago, gave them 51% with Labour trailing a dismal second with 26%.

The SNP suffer badly from the crooked first-past-the-post system used in Westminster elections. They got around half as many Scottish votes as Labour in 2010, yet won just six seats to Labour's 41. (The Lib Dems got fewer votes than the SNP, but almost twice as many seats, with 11. The poor Tories, meanwhile, got only 2% fewer votes than the Lib Dems but secured just a single MP.)

However, the nature of FPTP means that when a party's vote reaches a certain tipping point, the same system that previously worked against them begins to discriminate massively in their favour. The current surge in SNP support – with recent polls putting them in the unusual position of being ahead in Westminster voting intentions as well as Holyrood ones – might well be enough to trigger that phenomenon.

So what? Well, as Terry points out, the "so what" is that it's not at all implausible that a 2012 general election could see the SNP gain 20+ seats in Scotland. Combined with a Lib Dem wipeout, that could leave the nationalists in the extraordinary position of being the third-biggest party in the House Of Commons, and holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.

The concessions that such an SNP group would extract in return for their support in such an eventuality would be considerable. And while in fact there's a pretty strong argument that such a situation would by no means be entirely disagreeable to the Tories, politically it's pretty much impossible to imagine.

Much more compelling, of course, is the argument that such a fragile opinion-poll lead simply makes an election a suicidally risky move for the Tories. Not only might they fail to improve their current standing, but theoretically they could even lose. With three and a half years of power still to come, they're never going to take that chance, unless their poll ratings keep rising. (We suspect their current lead is just a short-term boost as a result of Cameron's EU madness.) But if they were considering it in a brief fit of daring, the Scottish Factor ought to ensure that more sober judgement wins the day.

Perhaps it's because the source of the news is the notoriously thirsty Labour peer Lord Foulkes, but we're amazed more hasn't been made of yesterday's bringing forward of an amendment to the Scotland Bill by the aforementioned Baron of Cumnock. We're not entirely sure how this fits in with the good Lord's previous assertion just last month that the Bill would in fact have to be scrapped altogether, but if passed the amendment would be nothing short of political dynamite.

At a stroke it would grant what amounts to "devo max", massively spiking the SNP's guns by delivering overnight the constitutional arrangement favoured by around 70% of the Scottish people. The battle lines of the independence referendum, which are currently hardening with every passing day around the two most extreme options, would be hugely blurred, and it would seem obvious that full independence would be far more likely to be rejected by the electorate, if only in favour of giving the new settlement a fair crack of the whip first.

We can find no informed commentator anywhere in the professional media offering a view as to the amendment's likely chances of success, and even the blogosphere has shown almost no interest, so we can only assume that they're low. We must admit that, not for the first time, we're at a loss to understand the FUD camp's ineptitude.

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There's some fairly predictable outrage from Nationalists bouncing around the blogosphere today at the news that control of the Crown Estates will not be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. This anger seems to us to be misplaced.

A pair of recent polls have reinforced what we've known for years – the constitutional settlement preferred by the large majority of the Scottish electorate is so-called "devo max", or Full Fiscal Autonomy, under which the Crown Estate would pass to Holyrood along with all other powers of revenue raising and expenditure. However, the three Unionist parties (or as we should more correctly put it, those who variously prefer to dub themselves Federalists, Unionists and Devolutionists, or FUDs) are all bitterly opposed to offering voters this option in the independence referendum.

With the status quo by some distance the least popular of the three possible arrangements for Scotland's governance, the opposition appears to be hell-bent on forcing Scots to make a straight choice between that and independence. It seems clear to this blog that such a stance can only be good news for supporters of the latter.

Were the UK Government to concede issues like the Crown Estate and Corporation Tax, plainly those who favour greater devolution would see progress being made, and in all likelihood be more content to reject full independence and continue down the gradualist path. But by going all out to signify that the UK will not grant the Scottish Parliament even fairly modest further powers, the Unionist parties can only succeed in driving more and more of those who want devo-max into the independence camp.

For our money, the starker the choice in the referendum is, the better.