Wings Over Scotland

Against our better judgement, we found browsing the Twitter feed of the Labour MP for Glasgow South (remember him?) on Friday for the first time in several months, after some irresponsible person (specifically this one) drew our attention to the fact that Tom was still boasting proudly about the Downfall-parody video clip that got him in trouble last year. And a couple of things struck us as at least vaguely interesting.

One was the “biog” entry below the avatar, which is a variant on a well-known chant often aired by fans of defunct Glasgow football club Rangers FC – “Nobody likes us, we don’t care”. It seems an odd, confrontational attitude to adopt for someone who relies entirely on being liked by the public to still have a job.

But it was the rest of the feed that revealed the oddest thing.

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There’s an absolutely despicable article on Labour Uncut today that we’re reluctant to link to. There’s a Google Cache version here, and in case it dies we’ve reprinted the whole thing below (sue us, Labour Uncut) so you don’t need to give the site traffic.

For the most part it’s a tedious rehash of the tired old “votes for 80 million expat and diaspora Scots” routine, but it’s enlivened with some ugly, base abuse of the First Minister, or “the fat, failed economist from Hollyrood” [sic] as author and Labour member Ian Stewart refers to him. The worst part, though, comes just before the end.

“At a time when the French voters of London have their own seat in the National Assembly, when serious moves are being made to press for a similar accommodation in the Irish Republic, not to mention Sinn Feinn’s mooting of some kind of a say for the wider diaspora, what do we get? Oh yes, the chance to maybe need a passport to visit granny.

Perhaps Mr Salmond made his attitude clear to these millions when he organised the great “Homecoming 2009” a while back – when it was clear to all that if your accent was in English rather than American, you had best not bother.”

This, we feel wholly confident in asserting, is a defamatory and libellous statement. The notion that Alex Salmond ever suggested, let alone made it “clear to all”, that English people weren’t welcome at Homecoming 2009 is one utterly unsupported in fact, and a normally-respectable site like Labour Uncut should be ashamed to have printed an open and direct accusation that the First Minister is a racist.

The battle over independence will get ugly in the next 18 months. We hope the Yes side doesn’t descend to the depths of Mr Stewart, and that the aggressive provocation of the Unionists doesn’t lead to the spilling of blood in Scotland as it continues to do in Northern Ireland. If it does, forgiveness will be a long time coming.

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Yesterday we reported the excellent news that US media giant CNN’s travel arm had named Scotland their No.1 travel destination of 2013, a move likely to generate many millions of pounds in increased tourism business for the Scottish economy. And to their credit, both the Scotsman and Herald also covered the story.

(Though neither of them apparently recalled the extensive coverage they’d given to the Holyrood opposition parties savagely attacking the Scottish Government for spending money on two trips to America to promote Scotland there in 2012.)

The Herald’s piece was so tiny and buried it attracted no reader comments (or none were approved), but the Scotsman’s more prominent article did. Why not take a moment and glance below to revel in the warmth, joy and positivity with which the publication’s Unionist readers welcomed this unequivocally happy development?

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Herald reporter Gerry Braiden posted these tweets last night:

We’ve contacted him asking if he has any more information, to which he replied “checking now”. It remains to be seen if the threatened protests will materialise, but in the meantime an alert reader uncovered a story from the Sunday Herald in 2001, in which the then-Grand Secretary of the Grand Orange Lodge in Scotland claimed that the British-nationalist organisation would turn itself into a paramilitary terrorist one if Scotland ever achieved independence.

You can read the full original story here. [Alternative link.]

The Irish Times, 26 November 2012:

“The DUP will campaign against Scotland voting for independence in 2014, party deputy leader Nigel Dodds told his party’s annual conference on Saturday. The North Belfast MP said that Unionists watched with sadness the attempt by Scottish nationalists to “undo the bonds of union which bound us through history”.

“But just as we have advocated the Union here in Northern Ireland, so we will be the advocates for the union in the midst of a Scottish referendum. Just as we have been proved right here, so, I believe, the people of Scotland will see that we are better together, better when we are united as one,” said Mr Dodds.

“This party believes strongly that, together, the United Kingdom has significant influence in the world. The break-up of the Union would be financially, culturally and politically devastating for all of the British people. As Unionists we oppose any action that would erode the shared cohesion of the constituent parts which make up this kingdom,” he said.”

Yes. We saw you “advocating the Union” last week.

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The modern Scottish independence movement is 84 years old, dating back to the 1928 formation of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. It is a peaceful, inclusive, civic and democratic movement – to the best of our knowledge, and almost uniquely, not a single life has been lost in pursuit of Scottish independence.

Despite this, so-called “Unionists” (more properly described as British nationalists) still regularly try to portray independence campaigners as violent racists. As recently as a few days ago, one prominent Labour activist frequently employed as a commentator on BBC Scotland political shows attempted to perpetuate baseless (but oft-repeated by Unionists) 70-year-old smears that the former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was a Nazi sympathiser engaged in attempts to collaborate with the Germans during WW2, sabotage the British war effort and set up a Vichy-style government in Scotland. These claims were cited, astonishingly, as evidence of “the SNP’s fascist past”.

Such attacks are all the more bizarre given the constant reminders on the news that the only nationalists attempting to secure their goals by violence in the United Kingdom are those who do so in the name of Britishness, waving the Union Jack.

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It’s got flowers on it and everything.

Gemma Fox is a rather strange lady who makes Lego dioramas of Royal Marine Commandos and who we had a childish but enlightening recreational argument with on Twitter last night. (Funnily enough after a long and tiring day visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.) James Mackenzie is a Green activist and one of the editors of the once-popular and increasingly-ironically-named Better Nation blog.

(Mackenzie threw an impressive hissy fit earlier this week when we very politely challenged him to support a seemingly-baseless allegation about another blogger, even going so far as to claim “harassment” on the basis of someone responding civilly to comments made in an open public forum. Presumably, as a Better Nation editor he’s just not used to people answering him back without being able to censor them.)

Ms Fox generously warned us last night that we had until “2000 hrs” this evening to delete unspecified tweets from our account, and that we should also “warn yer pals”. (We’re not quite sure who that means, but it might be you, so we thought we’d better let you know.) If we vanish suddenly at 8.01pm under legal action – the threat of which we’re sure is real and serious, and definitely not just the mad rantings of a delusional internet lunatic – speak kindly of us when we’re gone. We had a good run.

Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories have all recently called for the good people of England to speak up for the Union, and express how much they value the contribution of Scots to the UK. Helpfully (and very rarely), the BBC has allowed comments on a Scottish story today to give them the opportunity. We must admit, we didn’t manage to get through everything, but these are some of the ones that DIDN’T get modded off.

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A personal comment/disclaimer first. Brian Wilson is probably the first specifically Scottish politician I remember (well, apart from one I knew personally and socially, but that’s a story for another day). He was a prominent Labour figure in the 1980s, and as a young teenager with a just-awakening interest in left-wing politics it’s fair to say he was one of the main things that put me off Labour. Even at the age of 14 I got the impression of a nasty, snide, arrogant and pious career politico who’d say anything he thought might score a point over his opponent whether he believed it or not.

So in the interests of fairness and transparency we’re declaring a prejudice in advance. Brian Wilson is a horrible little man, up to his ear hair in the corrupt crony culture of Glasgow Labour, and whenever we hear him speak on any subject we’re reflexively and overwhelmingly inclined to believe the opposite of whatever he’s saying.

Nevertheless, we can’t help seeing a particular significance in the fact that he of all people was chosen to put Labour’s case on last night’s Newsnight Scotland.

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We mean cyberBritNats, of course. Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony brought a charming collection of positive Unionists out of the woodwork with moving, heartfelt words of British unity such as these. We’re choking up a little even now as we type.

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We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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