Wings Over Scotland

We’ve mentioned previously that one of the core tactics the No camp appears to be utilising in the referendum debate is that of attrition through extremism. It’s a strategy borrowed from the terrifying American right wing, and has two main goals.

One is to recalibrate the perceived centre-ground by abandoning any kind of moderate position and instead arguing positions so self-evidently ludicrous and dishonest that the listener is nudged towards assuming that they must be true purely on the grounds that nobody would dare to present such an audacious lie with a straight face. The other is to simply exhaust your opponents by forcing them to constantly battle over even the most basic and obvious facts, long before you get to the real debating points.

It’s a nihilistic but clever ploy, particularly effective in broadcast media where time is often very limited and such obfuscatory stalling can completely prevent the serious issues from being addressed at all. So far it seems to be pretty much the only weapon in Scottish Labour’s armoury, not just in respect of the referendum but also politics generally – a good example being the party’s absurd claims about the cost of knife crime during the 2011 election campaign.

It applies at the macro level as well as at the top end of the scale. When we started this blog we subscribed to the Twitter accounts of lots of prominent Labour activists in a naive attempt at engaging in genuine constructive debate, but were gradually forced to the realisation that the primary (or only) point of their dialogue was to deliberately waste our time and exasperate us into submission, and unfollowed them all.

So rather than be drawn into attempting to intelligently and forensically deconstruct three of the most recent outpourings of (calculated) lunacy from some of the No camp’s leading mad old men, we’re going to treat them with the amount of respect they deserve. Read the three articles below, then use your skill and judgement to decide (via the poll over in the central column) who’s the most barking-mad mental.

Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, insisting that an independent Scotland having its own defence forces is a hilarious joke

Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph, burbling about Alex Salmond sacrificing the referendum in return for more powers

Ian Smart in his shed, banging his worn-out drum of how Salmond doesn’t want to have a referendum in the first place

Vote now!

An alert reader points out a story in today’s edition of the once-popular regional periodical. See if you can pick out the curious inconsistency.

Headline: “Concern at decline in PE teacher numbers under SNP”

Third sentence: “However, schools have made up the shortfall by appointing additional PE teachers on temporary contracts – most of them part-time – which has led to an overall increase.”

We’ve emphasised some of the words as a clue. Did you get it?

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Nationalists like to taunt Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont for her reluctance to reveal her position on nuclear weapons. But in fairness to the little-seen notional chief, she’s hardly alone in her ambiguity. Despite the UK’s nuclear force being a huge issue, costing taxpayers tens of billions of pounds and being central to Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, one of the country’s two biggest political parties simply doesn’t seem to know – and hasn’t known for years, despite being in government on both sides of the border – whether it’s in favour of it or not.

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We were intrigued to notice a small piece in today’s Herald in which Ian Davidson MP made the claim that a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum could lead to the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the UK.

Mr Davidson’s assertion may well be correct. Both CND and senior figures in the UK military have suggested that while finding a replacement dock for the nation’s Trident submarines if they’re expelled from Faslane would be a relatively straightforward task, replacing the vital weapons facility at Coulport would be a much more difficult proposition, and could easily take ten years to come to fruition. In practice, it would be close to impossible to maintain the Trident force in such circumstances.

What’s slightly puzzling, however, is that the tone of the senior Labour MP’s comment appears to indicate that it’s intended as a warning, rather than a celebration.

In March 2010, the UK Parliament held a vote on whether the Trident fleet should be replaced with a new system. The vote passed comfortably with a majority of over 230, despite a majority of Scottish MPs (31 out of 59) voting against it. The intriguing thing is that one of the 15 Scottish Labour rebels who defied the party whip to oppose the renewal motion was Ian Davidson, then as now the MP for Glasgow South West.

Given that Mr Davidson is opposed to retaining Britain’s nuclear “deterrent”, and given his declaration this week that Scottish independence is the only means of bringing about the abolition of the UK’s nuclear weapons, we can only conclude that Mr Davidson has become a convert to the Yes campaign. We welcome his change of heart, but urge the campaign’s director not to appoint him as a spokesman.

Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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It’s funny how often we get accused of being slavish SNP devotees and “cybernats” here at Wings Over Scotland. In reality, while I can’t speak for the other contributors, I’ve voted Liberal Democrat at every election for the past 21 years. (Although I never will again, after the series of betrayals in 2010 and beyond.) Just thought I’d mention it.

So we’re halfway through “an unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” by the No camp, trying to persuade Scots to stay in the Union (but without being Unionist, of course). Twitter was alive on Saturday morning with Unio- sorry, Better Together activists all loudly (and oddly uniformly) proclaiming the “great response” they’d had on the streets of Scotland from voters, and publishing the pictures to prove it.

For those of you who couldn’t make it out to one of the “events” yourself, here’s a taste of the sort of pulsating, dynamic and above all positive action you missed.

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The Unionists have deployed a trestle table and some bizarrely faded plastic Union Jacks. We fear the game is up for nationalism from this day forward.

If this is the “unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” described in the Herald this week, we’re fairly quivering about the actual war. The above gathering of the No camp features former Secretary Of State for Scotland and Minister for Europe Jim Murphy MP, along with what look like failed Scottish Labour leadership candidate Ken Macintosh MSP and failed Scottish Conservative leadership candidate Jackson Carlaw MSP (though we can’t be 100% certain from the picture).

If that’s the sort of campaigning juggernaut “Better Together” can rustle up for such a collection of big hitters, goodness knows what ordinary footsoldiers are having to work with. We hope and trust that alert cybernats everywhere in Scotland will be gathering pictorial evidence of this mighty strategic onslaught, in order that we might collect it together for another of our always-popular photo galleries.

Our Twitter address is @WingsScotland. Keep us in the loop, readers.

As keen readers will know, this blog is often to be found lamenting the disappointing standards upheld by the Scottish media. We’re especially dismayed when fully-staffed professional newspapers fail to catch spelling errors and typos, such as the one that crept into Brian Monteith’s latest batshit-mental ponderings for the Scotsman.

While bafflingly castigating Alex Salmond for failing to have the referendum at a time advantageous to the Unionist parties, Conservative pundit and former MSP Mr Monteith has inexplicably left an “L” out of one of the words in this sentence:

“Then can we all move on and get back to the real world of sorting out the nation’s problems like having jobs for our youth and care facilities for our elderly”

Sloppily, none of the Scotsman’s subs caught the error. Can you help them, readers?

Well now, that rascal Brer Fox hated Brer Rabbit, on account of he was always cutting capers and bossing everyone around. So Brer Fox decided to capture and kill Brer Rabbit if it was the last thing he ever did! He thought and he thought until he came up with a plan. He would make a tar baby! Brer Fox went and got some tar and he mixed it with some turpentine and he sculpted it into the figure of a cute little baby. Then he stuck a hat on the Tar Baby and sat her in the middle of the road.

Brer Fox hid himself in the bushes near the road and he waited and waited for Brer Rabbit to come along. At long last, he heard someone whistling and chuckling to himself, and he knew that Brer Rabbit was coming up over the hill. As he reached the top, Brer Rabbit spotted the cute little Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was surprised. He stopped and stared at this strange creature. He had never seen anything like it before!

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The YesScotland campaign website conducted an interesting thought experiment last week, turning the independence referendum question on its head by asking “If Scotland was still an independent nation, would you vote to join the Union?” It was an interesting and imaginative piece, penned by campaign head Blair Jenkins, and it got us pondering over which other aspects of the referendum might take on a different perspective if viewed a different way.

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We note with micro-interest that the Unionist parties have today announced their preferred question for the independence referendum – a policy they all strenuously opposed at the election, in which they were overwhelmingly defeated. And unusually for this blog, as a result we find ourselves having something in common with the “No” camp, because nobody gives a toss what we think the question should be either.

Bearing that in mind, we invite readers to suggest their own proposed question. We’ll gather up all the best ones at the end of the day and send them to the Electoral Commission, in case they’d like to scrutinise them.

Courtesy of the sadly-deceased CalMerc, here’s an example to get you started.