Poll : Would devo max bring independence closer?

In a recent guest post at Better Nation, Craig Gallagher cited Joan McAlpine and myself as two of the rare nationalist subscribers to the "A-ha paradigm". Clearly this wasn't intended as a compliment, but nevertheless I did briefly entertain the idea of embracing my hard-won reputation by changing the name of this blog to Knowing Me, Knowing You - A-HA!, or On That Bombshell, or something else Alan Partridge-related. (Ideally I would have gone for Bigamy At Christmas, but alas, that was Tony Ferrino.)

Leaving aside the question of whether Craig was right or wrong about me, I think he was bang on the money on one point - namely that the unionist camp simply don't 'get' what it is about devo max that many nationalists find attractive. There does seem to be a genuine belief that nationalists are so obsessed with independence that anything short of that can't possibly be of any interest, except as a stepping-stone to independence itself. Unionists are perhaps projecting their own narrow-minded assumptions onto us - after all, it's only a few weeks since Ed Miliband declared that Britishness would lose all meaning outside the context of a political state that has London as its capital. So maybe they instinctively assume we must feel the same, and that without a Scottish state our cause is a total failure. Not so. We're Scots now and always have been, with or without the political structures to match. And if we knew for certain that independence was never going to happen, there can't be many of us who would shrug our shoulders and say that it doesn't matter what degree of autonomy we have within the United Kingdom. Of course devo max is well worth having for its own sake, regardless of whether it would bring independence closer.

And it's not at all clear whether it would or wouldn't. I've always felt that Margaret Ewing was right in the 1990s when she dismissed the "Big Bang Theory" of the SNP fundamentalists. Some kind of Scottish Parliament was probably an essential first step if independence was going to happen. But would a parliament that has virtually all the powers of a sovereign state lead people to think that independence isn't necessary, or would they think "well, there's no harm in taking the final step now"? Without sucking it to see, we can only guess.

So that's what I'm inviting you to do in today's poll. From a purely tactical point of view, do you think devo max would bring independence closer, or not? You'll find the voting form at the top of the sidebar, and the poll will close in a couple of days.

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Some of you might remember an article by Gerry Hassan a couple of years ago, in which he claimed that the idea that English sports commentators still go on about 1966 is a figment of our imagination, and that the only people obsessed with the subject are in fact Scottish football fans.

Ahem. Gerry, allow me to present to you Exhibit Y - Chris Bradnam's commentary on the Andy Murray tennis match just a few hours ago...

"And as we look at Sir Bobby Charlton, it's 66 points apiece in the match."

I'm not making this up. He actually said that. In fact, given the circumstances, it seems all but certain that the production team realised in advance there was a chance that the overall points tally was going to reach 66 each, and lined up the shot of Bobby Charlton for precisely that eventuality.

Future Chris Bradnam commentary -

"Geoff Hurst in the crowd there. Coincidentally, the last rally contained nineteen strokes, and we're now sixty-six minutes into the match."

"Great to see Jack Charlton cheering on Andy today. Funnily enough, my co-commentator Lindsay Davenport was born in 1976, and the mathematicians among you will already have spotted how significant that is if you subtract just one decade."

All he has to do is throw in a "that night in Barcelona" at some point, and the search for Clive Tyldesley's natural successor will be at an end.

And STV's studious neutrality isn't xenophobic either...

Gerry Hassan has a new article on the 'Anyone But England' phenomenon, in which he reaches a very different conclusion to my own. He doesn't actually use the word 'bigotry', but I dare say 'small-mindedness', 'xenophobia' and 'prejudice' amount to pretty much the same thing! I've already explained why I think the prevailing Scottish attitude towards the England football team has to be seen in the context of the unhealthy (and extremely unusual) media set-up we have, with broadcasters that earnestly claim to serve the whole UK dropping that pretence just as soon as England are involved in a football match. Gerry himself gives the game away when he talks about Scots annoyance at "the assumption in the English media that England might win the World Cup". I presume the "English" media he is talking about includes the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the UK-wide network ITV? For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not suggesting for a moment that the UK media should be anything other than totally supportive of England. But what they actually do is talk to their Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland audience as if they are English.

I must also take issue with a couple of Gerry's other specific points. He seems to regard the STV "who will you support?" campaign as an integral part of the 'Anyone But England' phenomenon. But how? Why? Not having an automatic loyalty, and being able to choose between the thirty-two teams for idiosyncratic reasons, is surely the 'default setting' for anyone from a country that has not qualified for the World Cup. Or is Gerry trying to tell us that the only way not to be "small-minded", "prejudiced" and "xenophobic" is to be actively pro-England? I can hardly think of a better example of a 'small island' mentality than not being able to imagine transferring your loyalty to anyone other than your nearest neighbour, regardless of who they are playing, regardless of circumstance.

But this is the comment from Gerry that really takes the biscuit -

"Some of the Scots claims border on the ridiculous. The belief that the English go on about 1966, was true forty years ago, but the only people who go on about it now are Scots football fans that can't get over it."

Has he never listened to a Clive Tyldesley commentary? Three seconds, Gerry!

'Anyone But England' isn't anti-English, let alone racist

Sunny Hundal has written a couple of posts berating HMV's decision to stop selling 'Anyone But England' World Cup T-shirts in their Scottish stores, following a complaint from the Campaign for an English Parliament. The gist of his argument is that by regarding "anti-Englishness" as "racism", the CEP are defining the English as a race, and thus implicitly suggesting that people from ethnic minorities cannot legitimately hold an English identity.

I know where Sunny is coming from, but it has to be borne in mind that there are serious instances of anti-English prejudice in Scotland (and of anti-Scottish prejudice in England) that ruin lives and even end in violence. There has to be proper legal protection for the victims - and if we can't call it racism because of problems of definition, what do we call it? Is a beating inflicted by a thug who hates English or Scottish accents really less worthy of note than a beating inflicted by a thug who hates Asians?

The issue here isn't so much that anti-Englishness is not racism, it's that wanting England to lose at football is not an example of anti-Englishness, let alone racism. This nonsense comes round every time England play in a major international tournament, with even Andy Murray being outrageously branded a racist by Tony Parsons in one of the most offensively misconceived newspaper columns ever written by someone not called Jan Moir. The 'anyone but England' impulse is in truth perfectly natural given the hopelessly unbalanced media environment we live in. If English people were only able to watch the World Cup via a Europe-wide German TV network, and the commentators and presenters insisted on talking at those English people as if they ARE GERMAN (because, after all, there's not that much to choose between 'Germany' and 'Europe'), what do you think the reaction would be? If people are to be branded bigots simply because they've had a gutful of the insufferable Clive Tyldesley and his ilk...well, it looks like I'll just have to live with being a bigot.

What's really revealing about the HMV incident is what it tells us about the true nature of the Campaign for an English Parliament. Can you imagine the old Campaign for a Scottish Assembly - let alone the Scottish Constitutional Convention - wasting its time over such froth? It sounds suspiciously like the CEP are more interested in wounded English pride and petty score-settling than they are in pursuing the noble aim of a national parliament for England.

In Clive Tyldesley's world, Nena saw 66 red balloons go by

For a good forty minutes I thought Mr Tyldesley was finally conquering his chronic case of 1966-mentionitis. He regaled us (I use the word in a relative sense) with tales of how Gordon Banks had been temporarily replaced in 1970, and how Italy had gone on to win the World Cup in 1982 despite drawing all of their first three games.

But then he went and spoiled it.

"Actually, only two sides have ever failed to win their opening match and gone on to win the World Cup. One was Italy in '82, and...you might remember the other one.

That's right. It was England. In 1966."

But that must mean...do you mean to say that England actually won the World Cup in 1966, Clive? Why has no-one ever mentioned this fascinating historical curiosity before?

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Things that Clive Tyldesley actually said, no. 43 -

"Algeria have looked the better of the two sides. ALGERIA."

One word, Clive : class.

There's only really one rule you need to know : never underestimate Clive Tyldesley's predictability

Not the most riveting of games tonight, but up and down Scotland people were - as is customary when England play - making their own entertainment by holding sweepstakes on how long into the match it would be before ITV commentator Clive Tyldesley deemed it utterly essential to remind us of the fact that his country won the World Cup in 1966. As it turned out, the drinks were on those who chose the 'three seconds' option.

Really.

To (only very slightly) misquote the words in question - "For most of you watching, 1966 is just a legend. But for me, it's my entire script."