Wings Over Scotland

In an extraordinary outburst on TV last night, “Better Together” campaign chairman Alistair Darling accused Alex Salmond of exaggerating the amount of extractable oil in the Scottish sector of the North Sea by 1,200%.

The former Chancellor (who we learned a few weeks ago thinks the population of Scotland is six million, creating an impressive 705,000 imaginary Scots) suggested that rather than the 24 billion barrels currently estimated by the oil industry – and commonly cited by the UK government – there were in fact just 2 billion barrels left.

As BT are a tad wobbly with numbers, let’s do a quick bit of arithmetic on that.

Read the rest of this entry →

Okay, we’re cracking on with this poll thing. Now we need your opinion.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re still mentally paralysed from this morning’s horrific TV, sorry. So here’s a wee screenshot that we took while setting up yesterday’s ludicrously successful fundraiser.

Vote Yes to stop this happening in the future, folks.

Woke up this morning and accidentally switched on the news, foolishly thinking “It happened yesterday afternoon, surely they’ll have run out of completely inane drivel to say about it by now”. Brain now turned to semolina. Can barely construct sentences, let alone analyse anything. Be with you in a bit.

Our hardworking and still-undiscovered mole at “Better Together” HQ reveals the extent to which the No campaign is becoming demoralised and irritable over the Scottish media’s increasing weariness – and sometimes outright mockery – of “Project Fear”.

(Five bonus points if you spot what’s extra-special about this one.)

Okay, it seems safe to say already that reaction to the idea is very positive, so why waste time? The new fundraiser page is now live. The more money we raise the more questions we can ask, so let’s see what we can find out.

[EDIT: Base target crushed in 70 minutes. Wow. But keep it coming, folks, because we’d love to get to 10 questions, which will take a total of about £3,600.]

For the sake of tidiness, comments on this post will be closed – please carry on commenting and suggesting questions in the original thread.

Recently we’ve seen quite a few people on social media wondering why there hadn’t been any opinion polls on independence published in a while. We thought it was a bit curious ourselves, so we rang a few polling companies with a view to commissioning our own one, but Panelbase told us they were doing fieldwork on one as we spoke, to be published roughly a week today (they’re every two months).

But even though we don’t need to do one on the straight Yes/No thing now, that’s no reason why we can’t take it upon ourselves to ask a few other questions.

Read the rest of this entry →

We linked you yesterday to a quite startling display of cognitive dissonance, as a dedicated Labour activist struggled to reconcile his party’s position on Trident with his own belief in disarmament, reaching some quite extraordinary contortions of logic in an attempt to convince himself that staying in the Union represented the best way of ridding the United Kingdom of weapons which are enthusiastically supported by every major UK political party and the Lib Dems.

But it’s not just mad bloggers who are frantically trying to whip up a sandstorm of spin to obscure Labour’s final abject surrender to the nuclear weapons lobby.

Read the rest of this entry →

In the whole of 2012, Wings Over Scotland was visited by 141,012 unique users, who made just under 2.6 million pageviews. In 2013 so far, we’ve reached 285,581 unique users who between them racked up over 6.6m pageviews.

Just wait until we really get started.

In Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel “V For Vendetta”, the central character tells co-protagonist Evey: “Silence is a fragile thing. One loud noise, and it’s gone”.

Yesterday we ran a guest post from the Scrap Trident Coalition calling for an end to the Johann Lamont and the Scottish branch of the Labour Party to end its silence on the subject of nuclear weapons.

But though Lamont remains “on holiday” and unavailable for comment on a range of issues (or even completely excluded from discussing them at all), her party has ended her silence for her, with a succession of loud noises nobody could possibly miss.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scotland doesn’t need a nuclear missile system. All we need to do is stick a few of these at strategic points around the coastline and see who wants to mess with us.

I think we all know the answer to that question.

It has long been clear that, if they remain in government, the Tories intend to replace Trident, and this week’s Lib Dem Trident Alternatives Review shows that they are also committed to maintaining the UK as a nuclear state in the face of public opposition. But what of the Labour Party?

Read the rest of this entry →