Wings Over Scotland

From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:

“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?

Here’s we’re-not-actually-sure-what-he-is Bob Mills earlier this evening on Radio 4’s News Quiz, hosted by Sandi Toksvig with a very quiet Fred MacAuley twisting his tartan bunnet in the corner and hoping for a pat on the head.

Whatever will they do for laughs without us?

The Sun’s editions on both sides of the border today go in heavy with the results of a YouGov poll showing a dramatic turnaround in the percentage of English (and Welsh) people who want Scotland to leave the UK.

Or at least, SOME of the results.

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John “Chicogo” Barrowman knocks ’em dead as the special mystery celebrity guest at the “Better Together” Burns Night celebrations, which we are not making up:

 (Edit by Jack Foster.)

Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, just discovered:

“It’s such a pity that nobody knows any history, or it would be quite obvious what so-called Scottish ‘Independence’ is about. Our continental enemies sought for centuries to detach Scotland from England, to weaken us. Now they’re doing it again. 

If Scotland breaks away from England, it won’t be run from Edinburgh, but from Brussels and Frankfurt, and Scots will discover what it’s really like to be someone else’s subject province. I’m sure they’ll have more sense.”

God DAMN it! Who knew we were just the unwitting dupes of the Belgians all along?

As alert readers will recall, this week we commissioned Panelbase to poll the good people of England, and we got some answers that we think will blow your minds. But we’re going to start with one we suspect people will find sad, but all too predictable.

Many will remember bitterly the short-lived “lovebombing” campaign from the indyref, in which a list of semi-celebrities from the rest of the UK was assembled to assure Scots of how much they were valued and cherished by their UK partners.

Four years on, not so much.

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For over two years now, this site has been warning that the UK government will take the earliest opportunity it thinks it can possibly get away with to abolish the Barnett Formula, the funding mechanism which the No campaign sold as the biggest benefit of Scotland remaining in the Union.

The Formula is hated almost everywhere else in the UK, by both politicians and the English (especially) public, who see it as an over-generous subsidy to the scrounging Jocks, and with the threat of independence theoretically removed after the referendum there’s very little protecting it.

Neither Labour nor the Tories – with just one Scottish MP each – would have much to lose politically from reducing Scottish funding by billions of pounds they could use to bribe swing voters in England instead. Barnett’s partial survival was the only solid commitment made in The Vow, but it’s set to be slashed by the Scotland Bill, and the smaller it gets the less resistance there will be to its total removal.

This week the House Of Lords made lots of headlines by highlighting the shambolic, half-baked state of the Bill, which hasn’t yet come up with a “fiscal framework” to replace the bulk of Barnett. But make no mistake – the Lords want it gone just as much as everyone else does.

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So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

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The Steve Bell cartoon in yesterday’s Guardian caused a fairly predictable reaction. SNP supporters and Yes voters were offended, some Guardian journalists drew ludicrous defensive comparisons citing Charlie Hebdo – as if people had called for Bell to be beheaded, rather than just expressed the opinion that the cartoon was nasty and racist – and lovers of comedy went off scratching their heads after fruitless attempts to understand what the joke was supposed to be.

(“It’s a quote!”, shouted quite a few people, naming about a dozen different historical figures as the alleged source of a line about trying everything once, but none of them offering anything by way of explanation on how that was connected to any comment or policy of Nicola Sturgeon’s or the SNP’s.)

Anyone naively thinking that the publication of the cartoon was just an unfortunate lapse or oversight will have been disappointed by today’s paper, which carries another painfully unfunny and incomprehensible Nat-bashing effort from Bell, although this time the offence is limited to the portrayal of Sturgeon and Alex Salmond as a pair of stereotypical kilt-wearing Jocks.

(The caption explains the strip as being purportedly about “Salmond and Sturgeon’s Highland fling”, but we haven’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. We’re not aware of them having visited the Highlands recently and we can’t think of any characteristic of full fiscal autonomy that resembles a traditional dance.)

Unionists, meanwhile, indignantly pointed out to some complainants that attacking the SNP isn’t the same thing as attacking Scots as a whole. But as media hysteria about the apparently-unconscionable prospect of Scottish MPs influencing a UK government reaches fever pitch, that distinction is getting less and less meaninfgul.

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The Guardian today carries an article by Gordon Brown, which echoes the content of his speech to the House Of Commons on Thursday. We’ve read it over and over again trying to make any sort of coherent sense out of it, but we’ve drawn a blank. The mighty architect of “The Vow” appears to have not the slightest idea what he actually proposes as a constitutional settlement for the UK and Scotland.

But perhaps we’ve missed something.

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As we’ve already noted this morning, today’s newspapers “reveal” something this site told you nine months ago – that a No vote in the independence referendum will see Scotland punished with a massive cut to its budget.

But some voters still don’t really know what the “Barnett Formula” is or how it works, so it seemed worth putting together a concise step-by-step guide to how it’ll be used to steal billions of pounds from Scots, should they vote next month to leave control of their affairs with Westminster.

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