The BBC's bizarre attempt to eradicate the word 'Scotland' from the Olympics

If you haven't been astounded enough lately, try watching the video in this tweet, because it's extraordinary.  It's from the BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics, and features 2002 curling gold medallist Rhona Howie (formerly Rhona Martin) accidentally using the word 'Scotland' in relation to the Great Britain men's curling team.  The host Clare Balding's reaction is staggering - instead of just correcting the slip, she puts the whole programme on hold for several seconds to deliver the kind of patronising admonishment that a parent might give to a three-year-old girl who keeps chucking jam at her grandfather's pet gerbil.  Rhona Howie visibly shrinks into herself and mutters "sorry".  Balding wraps the whole tragic episode up with the words "that's OK" in a tone of voice that menacingly implies: "It's not OK.  Don't EVER do that again."

For the uninitiated, there are two basic points that will help to make sense of all this -

1) Clare Balding was technically correct - all Scottish athletes at the Olympics represent Great Britain, and Great Britain only, whether they like it or not.

2) Rhona Howie's slip was entirely innocent and understandable.  Every single person who has ever represented Great Britain at the Olympics in curling has been Scottish.  In every four-year cycle, there are nine major international curling events - four World Championships, four European Championships and one Olympic Games.  In eight of those nine, Scottish curlers represent Scotland.  It's only in the other one of the nine - the Olympics - that they represent Great Britain.  All of the GB curlers in the current Olympics represented Scotland at the European Championships just a few short weeks ago, and as it happens they all won medals for Scotland - the women took the gold, and the men took the silver.

All of that being true, the natural thing for Balding to do would have been to casually say "Great Britain, you mean?", in which case Howie would have said "Great Britain, sorry", and there would have been no great fuss.  But it's pretty obvious that either Balding or the person delivering instructions in her earpiece was 'triggered' by Howie's slip.  They felt that mistakenly referring to Great Britain as Scotland was something that had happened far too often, and they were sick of it, and it needed to be made an example of, and stamped out once and for all.  All of which raised a few eyebrows in Scotland, because in our whole lifetimes you could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a BBC presenter, commentator or summariser has ever referred to a Great Britain team as 'Scotland', whereas the BBC referring to Great Britain as 'England' happens as a matter of routine.  For example, last year, BBC Sport's official Twitter account tweeted about the "England" team in the Davis Cup - a truly jaw-dropping blunder given that Scottish players (including the not-exactly-obscure Andy Murray) have been the backbone of the Great Britain team in the Davis Cup for several years.  The tweet was eventually deleted, but I don't recall the person responsible for it being hauled onto our TV screens and forced to issue a humiliating apology.  There have been countless occasions when presenters such as Balding herself or John Inverdale have been guilty of the 'England' slip without making any sort of acknowledgement, apology or correction.

And yet we're expected to accept that the word Scotland being used too often is THE major problem that simply MUST be tackled by the BBC and be SEEN to be tackled?  I almost wonder if there is something rather sinister and political going on here.

I've been watching quite a bit of the BBC's Olympic curling coverage, and even before the Balding incident I had the distinct impression that some sort of edict had gone out strongly discouraging the commentators from using the words 'Scotland' and 'Scottish', in spite of the unavoidable Scottishness on prominent display before their eyes.  What made it obvious was Steve Cram's tortuous explanation of why Great Britain were absent from the new mixed doubles competition, which somehow managed to avoid making any mention of the fact that it was the Scotland team's responsibility to try to qualify Great Britain for the Games, and that they had narrowly failed.  But I suppose if you acknowledge Scotland's official role in the Olympic qualification process, you must also acknowledge that any medals won would effectively be a Scottish as well as a British effort...and that would never do, would it?  The only time I can recall hearing the existence of a Scotland curling team being mentioned in commentary was when Logan Gray launched into a prolonged anecdote about the use of corn brooms in the famous Canada v Scotland final at the 1991 World Championships.  "Really?" said Steve Cram in a disinterested tone, as he apparently tried to shut Gray down.

The double standard is simply breathtaking.  In a couple of months' time, the 2018 Commonwealth Games will take place in Australia.  There will be no Team GB at the event.  Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey will all compete as entirely separate teams.  And yet, on past form, the BBC presenters including Balding herself will try to downplay that division as a meaningless technicality, and will routinely refer to Scottish medals as "more success for the Home Nations".  You might remember that at Glasgow 2014, Matthew Pinsent (I think it was him, anyway) fronted a package that considered how "British" athletes' form at the Games might translate into success for Team GB once the temporary segregation was over - and remarkably didn't once acknowledge the elephant in the room, namely that Scotland was only a few weeks away from a referendum on independence that could have meant Scottish athletes would no longer compete for Team GB.  A "No" vote was, it seems, simply being taken as a given by BBC Sport.

But who knows, eh?  Perhaps Clare Balding has turned over a new leaf, and will sternly knock that sort of nonsense on the head in future.  Without fear or favour, Clare, without fear or favour.  Perish the thought that there is any sort of agenda here.

Buoyant SNP bag belter of a by-election win in bloomin' Bonnybridge

The SNP have had a frustrating run of local by-elections since the UK general election last year - they've had one or two creditable results in wards they were never going to win, but in wards where they should have been competitive they've fallen short of expectations.  At last tonight we can celebrate both a substantial increase in the SNP vote and an outright victory.

Bonnybridge & Larbert by-election result (15th February 2018):

SNP 38.6% (+4.9)
Conservatives 32.4% (+8.1)
Labour 24.2% (+8.5)
Greens 3.7% (-0.1)
UKIP 1.0% (n/a)

The SNP candidate was eventually declared the winner on the fifth count, and was presumably helped by the fact that the Tories were the main challengers.  Labour voters are less likely to transfer to the Tories than vice versa.

Obviously the fly in the ointment here is that both the Labour and Tory vote increased more than the SNP vote did, meaning there was technically a swing from SNP to both Labour and Tory.  However, the reason for the increases across the board is that the independent councillor Billy Buchanan wasn't on the ballot paper this time, leaving his 20% of the vote up for grabs.  I gather that Buchanan is more associated with the unionist parties, so it may well be that his votes are predominantly unionist in character, and that you would have fully expected them to switch mostly to Labour and the Tories.

Why Pete Wishart is asking the wrong question about an independence referendum

As you may have seen, Pete Wishart has an opinion piece in today's issue of The National which effectively functions as his preliminary manifesto for the SNP depute leadership election.  The central thrust is a thinly-coded call for the party to allow its hard-won mandate for a second independence referendum to expire, and to instead try its luck at some unspecified point after 2021.  You won't be surprised to hear that I disagree with that entirely, which means that in spite of my huge regard for Pete Wishart, I'm almost certainly going to end up voting for someone else in the depute election.  Time will tell whether that'll be James Dornan or someone who has yet to throw his or her hat into the ring.

In fairness, Pete does half-heartedly leave open the possibility of supporting a referendum before 2021, but only if victory is "certain", which is an absurd threshold that is quite simply not going to be met.  Perhaps more pertinently, it's not going to be met after 2021 either.  We could wait twenty, thirty, forty years, but the fundamental point will not change - independence would be a rupture to the status quo, which means there will always be a considerable percentage of the population who fear it and instinctively oppose it.  The idea that gradual demographic changes or the long-term failures of Brexit are going to deliver us victory before we even fire the starting-gun is in the realms of fantasy.  Whenever the referendum happens, we'll go into the campaign uncertain of the outcome, and requiring a massive effort to emerge victorious.

Pete is correct in one limited respect - there is no guarantee that the big net swing to Yes during the 2014 campaign will be repeated next time.  The first independence referendum in Quebec in 1980 saw a substantial swing to No over the course of the campaign, while the second in 1995 saw a substantial swing to Yes.  It could very easily go either way, which means that all that can be said about the mid-40s showings for Yes in Scottish polls at the moment is that it leaves us within plausible striking distance of victory.  But the actual winning and losing will be done during the campaign, and that will be the case regardless of timing.  If we wait for certainty, we wait forever.  I'm not a big football fan, but I've heard it said of some football teams that they try to score the perfect goal and never actually shoot.  That's the first huge danger of Pete's strategy.

The second huge danger is that excessive patience may mean that we won't even be able to shoot for goal if we ever finally decide the timing is somehow 'optimal'.  It shouldn't be forgotten just how difficult it is to win a pro-independence majority in a Holyrood election fought under the Additional Member voting system.  Can you imagine the frustration if the SNP poll strongly in successive elections, but repeatedly fall just one, two or three seats short of a pro-indy majority, and consequently a referendum remains tantalisingly just out of reach for a couple of decades or more?  After the narrow defeat for Yes in the 1995 Quebec referendum, it was assumed it was only a matter of time before a third referendum would be called.  The sovereigntists duly won an overall majority in the 1998 election, but backed off from using that mandate - and as a result a referendum simply hasn't been possible for the last twenty years, because they haven't won a majority since.  They've been in power as a minority for a while during that period, but have never had the arithmetic to call a referendum.  I don't want the same fate to befall us.

Pete says the only question that matters is whether we win the next indyref.  But there's an even more important question that has to be placed before that - namely, "will we have the capacity to actually call an indyref?"  We know one thing for virtually certain - we'll have the arithmetic to call a referendum until May 2021.  We don't have a clue whether that will still be true at any point after May 2021.  Our window of opportunity is in this current parliament, and it would be a historic error to turn away from it.

James Today, Jam Tomorrow?

The dilemma thrown up by this year's SNP depute leadership contest is the same one we faced in 2014 - do we simply vote for the candidate with the strongest personal qualities, or do we base our vote on the candidates' views on the constitution and strategy, even though such matters are ultimately for the leader and not the depute leader to decide upon?  I suppose the logic for doing the latter is that the leader may regard this contest as a de facto consultation exercise, and will perhaps factor the outcome into her thinking.

I must say I've found the clarity of James Dornan's comments quite refreshing - ie. an independence referendum before the next Scottish election, possibly as early as next year, and a flat dismissal of the notion that the SNP's comfortable election win last June was somehow a rejection of a referendum.  That's bang in line with my own thoughts, and I'd find it very hard to vote against such a prospectus. 

By contrast, Pete Wishart's pitch is centred on the need to do something radical to court the minority of pro-indy and indy-curious voters who want to leave the European Union.  Specifically that means an independent Scotland would not seek full EU membership straight away.  I wouldn't dismiss that idea out of hand, because the problem of Leave voters jumping ship from Yes is a genuine one (if perhaps a little overstated).  But I do worry about the danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Independence as a life-raft to save our place in Europe is an incredibly powerful argument, and my gut feeling is that we undermine it at our peril.

So in the trivial battle for my own vote, I think it's fair to say it's currently Dornan 1, Wishart 0.  But I'm going to keep my mind firmly open as more ideas and candidates emerge.