Wings Over Scotland

Alistair Darling’s gremlin-plagued “positive case for the Union” speech in Glasgow yesterday, even leaving aside the weakness of its tired, reheated arguments (basically the same old “We cannae dae it” doom and gloom resprayed with an atom-thin coat of All-New Positivitrex!) might be the most boring thing we’ve ever read.

It drones on for a soul-sapping 26 pages and we can’t imagine how long it must have seemed when you were stuck in the room hearing it in Darling’s querulous, vexatious voice, but there’s one saving grace: the graphs. There are no fewer than 23 frequently-incomprehensible boxes, charts and diagrams, of which this is our favourite.

We’re not sure they’ve quite grasped how polling works.

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You’re not too late to catch Alistair Darling’s latest unveiling of “the positive case for the Union” via a live webcast on the “Better Together” website this morning. As we write he’s 10 minutes late, and the audience is rocketing towards triple figures.

We’re all playing bingo. Come and join us.

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Diligent readers will, we have no doubt recall, that the No campaign chairman, Alistair Darling, has made abundantly clear the conditions of any future enhanced devolution settlement for Scotland in the aftermath of a No vote in 2014:

“If you are going to stand on any platform of constitutional change you are duty bound to put it in a UK manifesto. It is not about a veto it is about having a mandate for it.”

Darling’s position couldn’t be less ambiguous – if Scotland rejects independence, any additional powers for the Scottish Parliament will be subject to the approval of the voters of the rest of the UK (chiefly England, which supplies around 90% of them).

But do we know how the good folk of South Britain are likely to view such a prospect?

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It’s like they’re actually writing the jokes for us.

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We know you don’t have all day. Let’s see if we can clear this up in under 600 words.

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(And finally… #26)

If only someone would come and free us from the burden of these terrible riches.

(Yawn.)

We expect we’ll be running this most weeks.

One of the main reasons we started Wings Over Scotland 15 months ago was a recurring frustration at the Scottish media’s constant failure to represent our views. Time after time we’d sit watching the TV with our blood pressure rising, shouting “Why aren’t you asking this CLEARLY lying idiot the staggeringly bloody obvious question that anyone with a IQ higher than a badger’s bawbag would be asking?” at the screen until the neighbours started banging on the wall again.

We’ve come a long way in 15 months, and we can at least now draw a sizeable audience’s attention to such unasked questions. But the phenomenon hasn’t lessened any, and last night’s Newsnight Scotland provided a textbook example.

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Poor old Captain D still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Click the image to find out what it is.

Your jaw just drops sometimes at the sheer cheek of it.

“I am pleased that this impartial body has […] rejected the nationalist attempts to silence their opponents by setting spending limits that would have given them an unfair advantage.” – No campaign leader Alistair Darling, in a post on the “Better Together” site today.

Remember: the “nationalists” wanted to let the No campaign spend £250,000 more than the Yes campaign –  a funny kind of “silencing” and a quite unusual definition of “advantage”, let alone “unfair”. Instead, the Electoral Commission has recommended that the Yes campaign be allowed to spend more than its opponents. We’re trying for all we’re worth to work out why Mr Darling considers that a victory.

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