Wings Over Scotland

In these brutal economic times, you could be forgiven for easing the pain with the occasional drift into fantasy. Britain is broke, and even after five years of the most savage austerity cuts since World War 2 the Chancellor of the Exchequer admits the books still won't be balanced.

But imagine, just for a moment, that we inhabited some sort of magical fairytale universe. Instead of a bankrupt neo-liberal service economy run for the benefit of obscenely overpaid bankers and hedge fund managers, imagine if Scots could live in a country of five million people with a social-democratic outlook and vast oil wealth which was used for the benefit of the entire population rather than just a tiny elite.

It's a ridiculous, impossible idea, of course. This is the real world, and reality isn't like that. But once in a while, just to cheer yourself up enough to keep grimly soldiering on through the hideous years to come, it's nice to dream.

Our dear chum “Comical Tom” Harris is at it again, this time crying to Holyrood magazine about the evil SNP and their cyberbullying, as well as continuing to punt the hopelessly-discredited lie that online unpleasantness is the sole preserve of SNP supporters (particularly ironic given Tom’s status as the Unionist camp’s troll-in-chief). Given that Harris is fond of proudly announcing that he’s blocked readers from his Twitter feed if they post messages he disagrees with, it’s hard to see who’s managing to upset the poor lamb so much. (Particularly as he notes that these awful bullies “tend to cover up” the vitriol he alleges they bear.)

More serious is Harris’ ludicrous allegation that there will be “nothing remotely democratic” about the conduct of the independence referendum – a shameful, borderline-libellous attack echoing Labour’s previous slurs which compared the First Minister to Mussolini and Hitler – something Harris apparently manages to say with a straight face in the same interview where he asserts that:

“People say there’s just as much antagonism on the Labour side and Labour people are just as nasty – that’s a lie, that’s wrong, and it’s demonstrably wrong.”

(We await keenly Tom’s attempt to defy all known laws of reality and prove a negative. In the meantime, we’ve politely asked him via Twitter to provide some specific examples of this “bullying” so that the vicious perpetrators can be shamed.)

Of course, we’re falling into Harris’ trap by even reporting this garbage. Currently trailing in fifth place in the Labour leadership race despite there being only three candidates, Tom is lashing out bitterly at all and sundry – including Scottish Labour’s own MSPs for their understandable decision not to subject themselves to any of his demented haverings in person – in a desperate attempt to turn his indisputable car-crash appeal into some sort of political power. Readers can decide for themselves, however, if this is the sort of behaviour that characterises a prospective future First Minister of Scotland.

As reported by many outlets today, Labour's latest complaint to the Parliamentary Standards Committee – this time an allegation that Scottish ministers conspired improperly in the decision to nominate Brian Souter for a knighthood – has met with an unambiguous rebuke, as the independent inquiry cleared the government of any wrongdoing. Only the Scotsman bothers to print Labour's bitter and graceless response to the committee's findings, one which suggests the party still isn't quite ready to approach opposition (or anything) in a positive and constructive manner.

Labour's previous complaints to the standards committee have all been similarly dismissed, whereas when accusations against the party have been upheld Labour has dismissed them as "partisan" and "politically motivated". It's tempting to wonder why Labour persists in filing complaints with a body it clearly does not consider to be impartial, and how much taxpayers' money it's wasting by doing so.

Speaking as a heterosexual atheist who thinks marriage for anyone is a stupid idea, I like to think I’ve got a pretty neutral view of the gay-weddings debate. So a blog post by devoutly religious SNP MSP John Mason last week addressing the issue wouldn’t on the face of it seem the sort of thing likely to bring a glow to my cold misanthropic heart. But it has, because it’s a refreshingly open and honest statement of his heartfelt position, coming from a member of a group of people – politicians – much better known for vague platitudes and cowardly evasion.

I disagree completely with Mason’s view that homosexuality is a sin, and I absolutely believe that gay people should be allowed to get married if they want to, and to specifically call the resulting union a marriage rather than a “civil partnership”. But it also seems to me to be plainly ridiculous that churches which espouse the same views as Mason does could be forced by the law to conduct such ceremonies against their beliefs. Churches are not state-funded organisations, and church weddings confer no legal status upon anyone that isn’t conveyed equally and fully by registry offices, so there is no “human right” or need to be married specifically in a church, any more than I have the right to walk into a vegan cafe and demand a pork chop. And if there’s no right, then there are no grounds for anyone demanding such a service should the church in question decline to provide it, for any reason it feels like.

Mason puts forward his view in a calm and dignified manner, while explicitly stating that he does not oppose gay marriage or any other form of discrimination against homosexuals. He supports the right to fully pursue a lifestyle that is at odds with his personal beliefs, and is entitled to expect the same courtesy in return without being called a homophobe, as has already happened with disappointing predictability.

As a politician the easy course of action would have been for Mason to keep his head down, avoid frightening any horses and let events take their course. But he has spoken up for his beliefs, and those of the many people who hold them, while unequivocally upholding the freedoms of others, risking opprobrium and vilification in the process. I wish we had more politicians with the courage of their convictions and the guts to express them freely and truthfully, even when those convictions are ones we might personally find distasteful. It is the very essence of freedom.

With the weather getting increasingly foul and wintry, why not curl up this weekend with an intriguing collection of Scottish political stories and commentary? The stuff's coming thick and fast these days, so get cosy on the sofa with a blanket and your laptop/iPad and work your way through this lot.

Over in the Scotsman, Joyce McMillan – not exactly noted as an SNP cheerleader – takes a sober look at the state of the nation(s) and concludes poetically that the times they are a-changin' in terms of people's attitudes towards independence, as the Scottish electorate looks for an alternative to the austerity future that isn't forthcoming from the UK opposition parties. Deeply sceptical of nationalism, McMillan nonetheless arrives at a near-Damascene epiphany: "in the absence of any better progressive project, there is a strong temptation to take a deep breath, and give it a go".

Dear old Alan Cochrane on the Telegraph is suffering no such doubts, lashing out at Labour's former First Minister Henry McLeish for giving succour to Cochrane's hated Nats over such issues as the anti-sectarianism bill, apparently in the belief that having held Holyrood's highest office somehow makes a person less entitled to offer his honest opinions than anyone else. Even Cochrane, however, is forced to also note the humiliating gaffe by the Tory leader Ruth Davidson at FMQs on Thursday.

The Express carries the latest attack on the SNP's referendum plans by Scottish CBI leader Iain McMillan, who fulminates furiously that uncertainty over independence will damage business – exactly as he's previously said of devo max, and indeed as he said back in 1997 about devolution. (McMillan's claims to speak for all of Scottish business in these outbursts, incidentally, has been disputed in the not-too-distant past by significant members of that community.)

Labour comedy relief Tom Harris, meanwhile, puts forward the view that what the Scottish people need most urgently in the coming years is someone who can make fun of the First Minister. Given that Harris is currently amusingly ranked by the bookmakers as fifth in a three-horse race for the Labour leadership, we're not sure he's going to have much chance to test that theory out.

Malcolm Harvey, formerly of the increasingly-erratic and confused Better Nation (which this week bizarrely invited us to take pride in the achievements of current Tory MPs who are implementing the coalition's brutal austerity measures but happened to be born in Scotland), has left BN and started a brand-new blog which promises an assessment of the current state of all the Holyrood parties. He opens proceedings by examining the condition of Scottish Labour, and his prognosis isn't good.

And on a related note, Labour Hame slightly surprisingly publishes a piece which faces up to the reality of Labour's current positioning on the political spectrum – namely, the fact that by any empirical and rational measure it is currently a party of the centre-right rather than the centre-left. The piece, by previously-unknown correspondent James Chalmers, concludes by saying the unsayable – that the only hope for Scottish Labour is to decouple itself from the right-wing UK party and operate in an independent Scotland, which would be more sympathetic to Labour's old values.

More tomorrow.

Holyrood witnessed an exceptionally dismaying FMQs this week, with all three opposition leaders embarrassing themselves to varying degrees. Iain Gray once again wasted his entire allotted time on pointlessly demanding a precise date for the independence referendum, which is still some three or more years distant. The First Minister's replies could have been provided by a tape recording and accurately predicted in advance by a primary-school child or an Old Firm supporter, and Gray was further humiliated by some stinging quotes from prominent Labour figures, including one previously highlighted by this very blog.

The Labour leader also came disturbingly close to an outright lie, in misrepresenting the views of the Parliament's former Presiding Officer George Reid by claiming that Mr Reid wanted the referendum supervised by the Electoral Commission. This was despite Mr Reid making his (somewhat different) actual position painstakingly clear in the Scotsman's letters page on the very same day.

But the real clanger was dropped by the new Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who castigated the Scottish Government for dropping legislation aimed at preventing the reduction of minimum sentences, affecting (among others) rape cases. The First Minister gently informed Ms Davidson that she had been misinformed by her researchers, pointing out that the legislation was in fact going ahead and would be brought before Parliament by the end of this month. Davidson sailed straight over the correction without a suggestion of retraction or apology, and went on to make an impenetrable point about demanding life sentences without possibility of parole for certain serious offences – seemingly asking the Parliament to do so regardless of the restrictions placed on such actions by the European Convention of Human Rights.

For the Lib Dems, Willie Rennie went for a worthless point aimed at the tabloid "Our Brave Boys" audience, demanding to know if Scottish soldiers serving in the British Army would be forced to resign and join a Scottish Army in the event of independence. Once again, an opposition leader could think of no more pressing concerns facing Scotland in 2011 than a trivial and hypothetical issue from a hypothetical future, many years away from anyone needing to worry about it.

Even when given a clear and direct answer from the FM – that no, soldiers would not be forced to do such a thing and would be free to choose which army they wished to serve in – Rennie persisted in some aimless rhetoric about soldiers currently fighting side-by-side somehow being pitched against each other and made to "choose between their colleagues and their country". Salmond slapped the line of attack down uncompromisingly with a retort about coalition-imposed redundancies among serving forces and election results in constituencies with military bases, and that was that.

First Minister's Questions is theatre, but it's nonetheless depressing to see all three opposition leaders so ham-fistedly squandering their main opportunity to hold the government publicly to account, something vital to any functioning democracy. Salmond can occasionally be made to look evasive and blustery at FMQs, but he didn't have to get out of second gear to crush his opponents today. He could have phoned it in, and that's no fit state for any self-respecting Parliament.

There's a fair old explosion of activity in the Scottish political scene today, with what appear to be some potentially highly significant policy movements starting to creak into life. In the Scotsman, slightly-renegade Labour MSP Malcolm Chisholm once again urges his party to back a referendum offering a devo-max option (or as he describes it, "devolution plus"), albeit one which stops short of full fiscal autonomy. Chisholm doesn't specify precisely how far the new devolution should go, instead proposing a cross-party convention – also including representatives of civic Scotland – to agree on the details of the option. While a commendable and sensible approach in theory, Chisholm is likely to struggle to get his own party to back such a plan, let alone persuading the Lib Dems and Tories to join in as well.

Meanwhile, over on the Herald Iain Macwhirter identifies signs of Labour beginning to shift on their current policy of backing the status quo, and examines the implications for the other parties if Labour manages to successfully occupy the middle ground. His conclusion is that should Labour suddenly become converts to the cause of devo max, the SNP may backtrack on its offer of a devo-max question and instead run a straight Yes/No referendum on full independence. In this blog's view, those are two very big assumptions – Labour (and the other opposition parties) are going to find it very hard to change their position now without looking utterly ridiculous, and the SNP would similarly find it extremely tricky, having made such a play of offering a devo-max question, to then retract the offer if the Unionists actually did manage to come up with a defined interpretation.

In the Guardian, Severin Carroll offers a different perspective on the debate over the number of questions on the referendum, from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, which represents over 50,000 voluntary charity workers. The organisation, while not explicitly taking a view on the referendum itself, urges that in the light of the Westminster government's brutal attacks on the poor and the sick, Scotland must take control of its own welfare revenue spending – a status which would in practice require either independence or an extreme version of devo max.

Carroll then spins off in some odd directions from the SCVO's comments, for example getting Labour's Margaret Curran to apparently support the coalition's policy, claiming that "a million voters supported Labour's tougher stance on benefits". (She presumably means Scottish voters, and is presumably citing Labour's 2010 general election result in Scotland as backup for the assertion, which is a rather strained assumption about what people were voting for.)

He also states that "Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and most powerful Scot in the shadow cabinet, confirmed last Saturday that Labour's stance on more powers for Holyrood had now shifted, in favour of greater devolution", which is something of a stretch. What Alexander actually did in his speech to Scottish Labour's youth wing was express a personal opinion which at present is still explicitly rejected by all three of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates in favour of the status quo. If the party is indeed now in favour of greatly-expanded devolution, it's not letting on.

Finally, the Dundee Courier picks up on an embarrassing display of hypocrisy by the UK Government. Having spent weeks and months demanding that the SNP publish the Scottish Government's legal advice on an independent Scotland's position with regard to membership of the EU and the Euro, the Westminster coalition has now refused to publish its own legal advice on the same issue. Oops.

We'll let you digest that little lot for a while.

(See here.)

"The starting point is that we are equal nations choosing to come together and that equality means we in Scotland can make demands in a claim of right for the powers and responsibilities that we want. Beyond that however we need to describe the positive advantages of being part of a new United Kingdom."
(Malcolm Chisholm, Labour MSP, November 2011)

"[the proponent for independence] deserved to win, because he did the thing which usually wins a debate: he asked the question which mattered, and didn’t get a satisfactory response. And the question was this: what is the positive case for the Union?"
(Andrew McKie, conservative political commentator, November 2011)

Still waiting.

A wise old German proverb was quoted in the Guardian recently. It runs like this:

"What do two monsters do when they meet each other in the forest?"

"They smile."

It's hard not to think of it as you watch the progress of the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill through Parliament. The media has devoted a lot of column inches to the bill in recent days, with a variety of viewpoints. SNP MSP Joan McAlpine wrote an impassioned opinion piece for the Scotsman in support of the bill yesterday, while legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier took the opposite approach, forensically examining the finer details and concluding that in extreme circumstances it could conceivably be used to criminalise behaviour that might seem trivial at worst.

The Scotsman's main editorial coverage today takes an uncharacteristically neutral stance, reporting the fact that the opposition parties, particularly Labour, are refusing to back the bill despite having put forward no amendments to it. They also provide two further short opinion comments, one from each side of the debate.

Against the bill, a sociology lecturer from Abertay University (no, us either) offers a rather unfocused ramble that sounds uncomfortably like some bloke in the pub sounding off after a couple of pints and concludes dramatically that the bill is "the most authoritarian piece of legislation in recent history", while the President of the Association Of Scottish Police Superintendents contends that in fact it's a welcome clarification and simplification of the law with regard to sectarian offences.

The vast majority of the Scottish people, meanwhile, heartily sick of the poison that spreads outward from Ibrox and Celtic Park and infects the rest of Scottish society, wait to see if something is finally going to be done.

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If Tom Harris’ bid for the leadership of Scottish Labour is indeed some form of elaborate practical joke, you have to applaud his comic timing. On the very day that the media covers the announcement that Scotland is to host the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, providing clean renewable energy for almost half the Scottish population from a single installation (and destroying the UK government’s recent assertions that uncertainty over the independence referendum is deterring investment in the country), Harris has chosen to go public with a call for the building of more nuclear power stations in Scotland, insisting that “renewables cannot meet all our energy requirements”. We’re sure it’ll be a votewinner.

The story appears behind the Times paywall, but you can see it by clicking below.

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As a newspaper, The Scotsman is under absolutely no obligation to report the news impartially (a fact frequently misunderstood by a great many people). But it's becoming less and less subtle in its distortions of the truth the further we get into the SNP majority administration. One of its big politics stories today is a case in point. As a reader of Wings over Scotland you are by definition a normal, well-adjusted person, so how would you interpret the following headline?

"Swinney demands £20bn to secure the economy"

Since John Swinney is an MSP with a remit which covers only the devolved Scottish Government, naturally you'd assume he was demanding this £20bn for Scotland, right? Particularly as the story opens with this sentence:

"Finance secretary John Swinney has demanded billions of pounds from the UK government for major building projects in Scotland"

Even for the most ardent nationalist it sounds an outrageous demand, even in less austere times than these. £20bn is around two-thirds of the Scottish Government's entire annual block grant, and would pay for every conceivable major infrastructure project in Scotland – finishing the Edinburgh trams and the Edinburgh and Glasgow airport rail links, dualling the entire A9, building the new Forth road crossing, completing the Borders railway, implementing the Beauly-Denny power line and opening the carbon-capture plant at Longannet – with a good £10bn still left over.

But with readers duly inflamed, the next paragraph quietly reveals the truth. Swinney wants the Chancellor to spend £20bn on capital investment projects in the whole of the UK, with just a tenth of that money coming to Scotland. He's asking for £2bn, not £20bn, and – we find out another nine paragraphs later – that £2bn would be spread over three years, amounting to a somewhat more modest £0.67bn a year for Scotland, set against the UK government's total annual Scottish spending of £53bn.

The arguments for extra capital investment to drive growth, create employment in the construction sector and avoid a double-dip recession are economically sound, but that's another debate entirely. The Finance Secretary has in fact asked for approximately one-thirtieth of what the Scotsman's highly-misleading headline implies. It's hard to see that misrepresentation as an accidental one.

An alert viewer draws attention to an interesting historical curio in the Scotsman today. It's a letter to the paper from Labour MSP Hugh Henry, dating from a few days after the 2011 Holyrood election, in which he rejects the idea of an early independence referendum in the most unambiguous of terms:

"Mr Salmond and the SNP clearly stated that any referendum would be held later in the life of this parliament. That's what many Scots voted for, that's what gave Mr Salmond his majority and that's the mandate which the SNP has."

Henry isn't exactly a radical dissident in Scottish Labour – he was Education Minister and Deputy Justice Minister in the second Lab-Lib coalition administration, and was mainstream enough to be the party's nomination for Presiding Officer earlier this year. In the light of Labour's recent threats to back the Westminster government in forcing an earlier UK-controlled referendum over the Scottish Parliament's head, it would be interesting to find out if his position is the same now as it was six months ago.