Wings Over Scotland

(See here for the whole story.)

"As we get closer to the referendum, people will realise that staying within the Union has substantial benefits for Scotland."
(James Kelly, Labour MSP, December 2011) (at 4m 20s)

"We've got a distinctive argument to make on the power of Scotland inside the United Kingdom."
(Johann Lamont, Labour leadership contender, December 2011) (at 23m 08s)

Sadly, both Mr Kelly and Ms Lamont ran out of time before they could actually explain what these substantial benefits and distinctive arguments were. Oh well.

Still waiting.

Labour's justice spokesman Richard Baker brought one of our favourite songs to mind today, with an outburst (reported in the Herald) that lays bare just exactly how stupid Scottish Labour still thinks the electorate is. A study by the OECD has found that the pay gap between the highest and lowest earners has grown more quickly in the UK than in any other high-income country since 1975, with a particularly sharp rise since 2005. With no detectable shame, Baker was quickly moved to note in response that:

"This survey only confirms what Labour has been saying for months now. Under the Tories the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

We hesitate, readers, to point out anything so blindingly obvious for fear of insulting your intelligence, but… of the six years between 2005 and now, Labour was the UK government for five of them. Of the 36 years between 1975 and the present day, Labour was in charge for almost exactly half (17 out of 36), and for 13 of the last 14.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that the lot of the poor didn't improve over that time – as Labour MP and Baker's prospective new leader in Scottish Labour, Tom Harris, has sneeringly reminded us recently, "We weren't set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society". But that Baker genuinely appears to believe everyone will already have forgotten Labour's record in power speaks more about the attitude of Scottish Labour than we could ever do.

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There are many good reasons not to envy Scottish Labour members, but the miserable choice they're being offered for their new leader must be near the top of the list right now. Last night's edition of Newsnight Scotland was devoted to a hustings between the three hopeful candidates at the BBC studios in Glasgow, and watching it felt like an intrusion on private grief.

To be fair, the setting didn't do much to portray the candidates in a good light. Newsnight's Raymond Buchanan was a clumsy host, alternately barging in over the top of the three when they were trying to give an answer then letting them waffle on when they were saying nothing at all. The audience was also a limp rag, putting up mostly feeble, long-winded and vague questions capable of inspiring nothing but empty platitudes from the contenders.

(One bloke in a red tie wasted about a minute of the show's limited airtime wittering on incomprehensibly about sport before Buchanan finally cut him off in exasperation, and the final audience contribution was particularly toe-curling. Some studenty girl came out with a half-baked Marxist polemic demanding to know what "direct action" the candidates were going to do about the nasty bankers and such. When Buchanan asked her what sort of direct action she'd like to see taken, she clearly wasn't expecting to be asked to provide a constructive suggestion and just stammered that she wanted to hear the candidates' plans. Even the vacant rhetoric she got in reply was better than the question deserved.)

But even allowing for the difficult circumstances, McIntosh, Lamont and Harris offered little to fire enthusiasm among the comrades, or even to distinguish themselves from each other. The only partial exception was Tom Harris, and we still can't tell if he's serious or just trying to use shock tactics to kick some life and sense into his party. Either way, we're not sure that coming out loudly and proudly in favour of tuition fees and nuclear power stations is the way to lead Labour to glorious recovery in Scotland.

Harris is also a dyed-in-the-wool Nat-basher, a strategy which failed Labour on an epic scale in 2011 and which Lamont and (especially) McIntosh appear to be backing away from as fast as is decent. We know these things because all three spent the vast majority of the broadcast talking not about Labour, or even about the Westminster coalition that's imposing savage austerity cuts on Scotland, but about the SNP.

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There’s only one story in the Scottish political media today. The explosive contents of the Scottish Social Attitudes survey have been seized on with glee by the SNP, leaving the Unionist camp in desperate damage-limitation mode. The news – first broken by the Express – that a whopping 65% of Scottish voters only need to be convinced that independence will benefit them by around £9 a week in order to vote for it has sent Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems into something of a panic, and it’s fascinating to watch both they and the predominantly-Unionist media try to spin it.

Tory Hoose takes the “we see no ships” angle, announcing that the SNP’s natural welcoming of the poll results is “hysterical grandstanding”, while rolling out David McLetchie to pick out a different section of the results and claim that “This is just one of the many polls that shows support for independence is still relatively low.”

The Scotsman goes for a similar approach, with trusty psephologist Prof. John Curtice sent in to find the most negative view of the survey possible, listing a whole slew of cautions and provisos and comparisons of dubious merit, eg pointing out that support for independence is still lower than that for devolution in 1999 (which is about as surprising as finding out that Andy Goram’s favourite fruit is oranges).

The Herald features a quote from Labour’s Margaret Curran that borders on flat-out hilarious in its twisting and turning to find a position from where the figures look bad for the SNP – eventually settling, like Curtice, on a bemusing comparison with 1999, which for all the relation it bears to the current economic and political climate might as well be 1929. The Herald also runs the most perceptive piece in the mainstream media, in which Robbie Dinwoodie observes that the “old scare stories” beloved of the Unionist parties are slowly but surely losing their power over the Scottish electorate.

The BBC, meanwhile, comes up with a fairly snappy at-a-glance summary of the results, but none of the media pick up on some of the survey’s stranger quirks.

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I’ve seen Threads. I have, in fact, seen it more than once, which is some special sort of idiotic masochism. So I’m no sort of shrinking violet when it comes to crushing, soul-destroying bleakness. I’m made of reasonably stern stuff, backed up by the sort of misanthropy that serves as a “Well, duh” shield against the horror of humanity.

So I don’t speak lightly when I say I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything bleaker or more horrible than episode 1 of Black Mirror.

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LabourHame allows Labour's frustrated grassroots to speak out for a positive approach to the referendum, relaxes its draconian comment censorship a little (for how long, we can only guess), and opens the floodgates.

As regular readers will know, as a supporter of independence this blog fervently hopes that Tom Harris wins the contest for the leadership of Scottish Labour. Not only because Comical Tom – a fervent pro-Unionist who has already proclaimed that "I don't want Scotland to run her own affairs" – would be a massive recruiting sergeant for the Yes campaign, but also because he's simply the most entertaining.

It recently dawned on us that by joining Youth Labour for just £1, we could actually help to make such a thing happen by having a vote in the leadership election. We duly filled out the form with some enthusiasm, but were sad to realise that we lived far too far away from any of the hustings to quiz Tom directly. Until, that is, he sportingly hosted a live Q&A session on his website…

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Combined spending in Scotland by the four main parties for both the 2010 UK general election and the 2011 Holyrood general election, in descending order:

LABOUR: £1,785,000

CONSERVATIVES: £1,546,000

SNP: £1,456,000

LIB DEM: £647,000

(Sources: here and here.)

In the wake of a duller-than-usual First Minister's Questions, most of the press today is covering the report released by the Electoral Commission detailing the various parties' spending in the 2011 Holyrood election. The headline soundbite is that the SNP's expenditure was, in the words of The Scotsman, "close to the combined total of the three other largest parties", at £1.14m compared to £1.27m for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories together.

Predictably enough, Labour seize the opportunity to complain about large donations, with MSP Drew Smith pouting that "the SNP is addicted to big money, reliant on huge donations from a small number of wealthy individuals", in the light of the SNP having received two such large sums in recent months from the will of the former Makar Edwin Morgan and lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

We're not aware of Mr Smith having raised any such objections when, for example, Lord Sainsbury donated £2.5m to Labour in 2003 – eclipsing the SNP's two big donations put together – but we'll gladly publish any corrections should he have done so. We're also not sure that Mr Smith's party will enthusiastically welcome his objections to large donations from wealthy individuals, as a cap on such contributions (currently being proposed by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life) would have slashed Labour's income by 72% over the last five and a half years.

Most of the coverage today notes the growing financial health of the SNP compared to the other parties relative only to the situation in the 2007 Holyrood election, with its spending rising while that of the Unionist parties declines. What we found curious, though, was that none of the papers took the trouble to also make what would seem to be the most obvious comparison in a recent Scottish context – the parties' expenditures in 2011 compared to the 2010 UK General Election.

We had a little dig around on the Electoral Commission's website, and turned up its 2010 report, whose figures reveal some moderately interesting things.

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The Herald's Robbie Dinwoodie tweets this morning:

"Is this a record? 09:43 – Labour Press: "Gray demands Minister for Youth Jobs." 09:46 – Scottish Government: "First Minister announces Minister For Youth Employment.""

Looks like Gray's been taking timing lessons from Ruth Davidson…

Okay, so after yesterday's fit of grand polemic for St Andrew's Day we've got some normal news to catch up on again. We left off mentioning this before because the Newsnet Scotland server had a bizarre extended outage and because the feature itself is horribly written, but the statistical fact that the mainstream Scottish media is 11,319 times more likely to run a story based on the SNP being accused of some terrible wrong than they are to do the same thing to the Tories, and that "accused" stories directed against the SNP make up 88% of all such articles, is definitely worth examining if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, the BBC and Herald run a pair of bone-chilling pieces about the economic future of the UK (the latter one also echoed in the Scotsman). In the coming years before the independence referendum, it's increasingly clear that it's going to get harder and harder for the Unionist parties to credibly push the "stronger together, weaker apart" line, because it's hard to imagine how an independent Scotland bursting with natural resources could possibly be in a bigger mess than successive Labour and Tory governments have left Britain in, even if we elected The Krankies to run it for a laugh.

The Scotsman also runs with an interesting piece linking the gay marriage consultation with the independence referendum, highlighting comments by former SNP leader Gordon Wilson suggesting that the SNP can ill afford to alienate a single voter in the run-up to the vote with such controversial policies. It's a fair enough point, except that with Labour and the Lib Dems on the same side as the SNP on the issue, and the Tories actually led by a lesbian, we're not sure there's much scope there for the opposition to exploit it politically. (Curiously, while the Scotsman piece makes great play of Wilson's SNP connection, it neglects to mention anywhere that Bashir Maan, one of the other opponents of gay marriage extensively quoted in the piece along with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is a prominent former Labour figure.)

And as with the sectarianism bill and minimum pricing, the SNP is wisely front-loading its more contentious policies into the first half of the Parliament – presumably counting on any furore having long died down by the time of the referendum, as armies of angry Old-Firm-supporting gay couples enraged by the price of booze for their weddings fail to materialise on the streets.

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It’s even happening in Bath. Even in one of the richest corners of Britain – a city so posh that it refused a local organic dairy farm permission to open a boutique ice-cream concession in its expensive new shopping area in case it “lowered the tone” – there’s an Occupy protest. A couple of dozen tents huddle together in Queen Square, a small green space in the middle of a busy traffic junction that’s more accustomed to hosting farmers’ markets and games of boules.

To be honest, I’m surprised there are that many. Bath’s housing, parking and public transport are all so cripplingly costly that poor people can barely get into the centre of town even for a visit. But still, like most of the Occupy protests nationwide (those that still survive at all, anyway), the numbers are pretty pitiful. At a time when the government has all but openly declared class war, when everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail is furious at the greed of the wealthy, why aren’t there millions on the streets, rather than a few little pockets out camping in the cold?

The answer is obvious, but for some reason is never spoken aloud. Despite the Occupy movement’s catchy and evocative slogan, we aren’t the 99%. But that’s understandable, because “we are the 33%” doesn’t carry quite the same moral punch.

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