Wings Over Scotland

We haven’t written anything about the Guardian’s explosive story on currency union this weekend, largely because we have nothing much to add to it.

The original piece seems to cover everything pretty well, and just about all we can think of to comment on is the way the BBC and many other newspapers have seemingly deliberately misinterpreted a line of the unnamed minister’s quote, to portray it as a suggestion that there would be a direct trade of a currency union for Scotland continuing to host Trident after independence.

But it’s not the only one of the pillars of the No camp that’s crumbling today.

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We’re sure our ever-alert readers don’t need telling, but it never hurts to put up a little refresher course for those who might have joined recently.

As it becomes clear to everyone in Scotland that the No camp’s promises of the UK being the guarantor of survival for the Govan shipyards was the cynical lie those of us on the Yes side always said it was, it’s been interesting to watch the panicked response from the Westminster government.

Let’s take a quick look at how it works.

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The dust of the independence referendum is showing a distinct unwillingness to settle. Almost a month from the vote, alien observers would be hard pushed to identify Yes as the beaten side. SNP membership has more than tripled, and that of the Scottish Greens and SSP (much) more than doubled, in three weeks. The moribund Labour Party in Scotland has slumped in both Holyrood and Westminster polls. Newspaper sales figures continue to fall after not a single daily or national newspaper in the country backed the choice of almost half of the population.

Unionist politicians unnerved by the closeness of the result have advocated making independence actually illegal, and the Secretary of State for Portsmouth has issued a series of panicky warnings that the “nationalists” must not seek the best possible outcome from the figleaf Smith Commission (or, presumably, he’ll tell his mum).

Increasingly, the “once in a lifetime” referendum looks like only the opening skirmish.

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Perhaps the most notorious injustice ever committed by the UK government against Scotland (with the possible exception of the infamous “40% rule” in the 1979 devolution referendum in which the dead were counted as No votes) was the suppression for 30 years of the McCrone Report, which revealed how wealthy an independent Scotland would have been after the discovery of oil in the North Sea.

Successive Labour and Conservative governments at Westminster frantically fought to deceive Scots over the value of the bounty for decades. And now, on the eve of another referendum, it looks like they’re about to try it again.

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To be honest, readers, when we’re busy, which is always, we have a tendency to stop reading newspaper stories by the time they get to the quote from a “Better Together” or UK government spokesman. It’s not exactly tricky to predict what they’re going to say, and in the case of the former it’ll usually be some boorish, juvenile sneer that just makes us depressed.

But last night we happened to get all the way to the end of a Scotsman article (we were surprised too), and noticed something that was a more blatant lie than usual.

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A thing we’ve noticed throughout the referendum campaign is just how delicate many of those on the No side are when faced with any sort of unfavourable information. Having perhaps expected a very easy ride, a lot of Unionists (and indeed several journalists) have proven terribly thin-skinned, with a tendency to fly off the handle at comically slight amounts of challenge.

The Secretary of State for Portsmouth, for example, having been introduced into the debate as a “bruiser”, hadn’t been in his post five minutes before he was bawling to STV’s Rona McDougall for protection as the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon hammered him with nothing more than a few facts and arguments.

When placed under even the tiniest modicum of pressure, No-camp figures will panic and start blurting out the most ludicrous claims, like Ian Davidson’s extraordinary, petulant “Newsnat Scotland” outburst at a justifiably offended Isabel Fraser, or Alistair Darling’s mad assertion that North Sea oil was on course to run out in January 2017.

And so it was this week with Tory MSP Murdo Fraser.

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Alert readers will have noticed that we’ve been studying the UK government’s latest independence paper today. The 24-page booklet comes with a foreword from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth promising that it contains “the positive case for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom”, so we thought it’d be fun to share some of our favourite snippets of positivity.

We could do with some cheering up.

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We’ve just been watching the latest of the BBC’s big independence referendum debates, and we’d like the hour of our life we wasted back, please.

It wasn’t as though it was the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. It was, if nothing else, relatively even-tempered, helped by some firm moderation by James Cook. Lesley Riddoch was as reliable, sensible and on top of the facts as she always is (although even we’re starting to get fed up of hearing her go on about Norway all the time). And while Brian Wilson is a dishonest and bilious wee nyaff, he does have the one huge saving grace that he isn’t Anas Sarwar.

But tell us this, readers – what was the point of it all?

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We appreciate that you’re busy people, readers, so through the miracles of modern technology we’ve actually managed to compress the entire five-minute interview between Andrew Neil and Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Portsmouth, on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland down to just 19 seconds without in any way compromising the accuracy or completeness of its content.

If you watch the whole thing we think you’ll agree we’ve captured the essence.

When we started the week with news of the UK government’s statement on debt, we wondered aloud whether it would be a game-changing moment. Judging by the No camp’s reaction since then, shrieking and flailing and lashing out blindly in all directions simultaneously, our question’s been answered.

It’s been hard to keep track of it all, but we’ll have a go.

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This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.

It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.

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We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.

So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.

And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.

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