Wings Over Scotland

The Sunday Herald, which enjoyed a major sales boost from being the first Scottish newspaper to officially back independence but has since seen its circulation increase partly eroded, has this morning chosen to throw a stick of dynamite onto the fire.

The paper’s front page today teases a double-page spread inside with the headline “SPECIAL REPORT: HOW INDEPENDENCE SUPPORTERS SHOULD USE THEIR SECOND VOTE”. And then things get a little strange.

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While we’re on the subject of Ruth “line in the sand” Davidson of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To The SNP Anti-Referendum Party making U-turns, we thought we might remind you of another one, this time from rather more recent history than 2011.

Just nine months ago, apparently Ms Davidson’s view was that “it would be wrong for the Tories to stand in the way” of another referendum “if the SNP gets a democratic mandate from the public”.

Sounds like a firm, resolute commitment to democracy and the incontrovertible right of the people of Scotland to determine their own destiny. Stirring stuff. We approve.

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The Scottish Conservatives manifesto for Holyrood, 2011:

But maybe it’s different if you’re openly campaigning to lose.

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Last weekend’s edition of the Sunday Times gave an article to a Green activist and party worker – not billed as such, even though until last month he was on the party’s regional candidate list for Lothian – to predict that the Greens would get 10 seats at next month’s election.

Much campaigning by the various fringe parties for the Holyrood contest has been based on “seat predictors” like the one deployed to produce the figures in the piece, purporting to show that a tactical-voting strategy on the list can deliver a large gain in numbers of pro-independence MSPs compared to using both votes for the SNP.

We’ve examined that argument in considerable depth already, both theoretical and practical. But its also worth noting that so-called “seat predictors” are a rather shaky basis for making such bold forecasts.

Let’s illustrate that assertion.

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We’ve made some progress. It’s just three days since we outlined a question that all the leaders of the Unionist parties should be asked, and we have our first answer. An alert reader emailed it to Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, and to his credit he gave a quick, straight and unequivocal response. This is it:

“I don’t like addressing too many hypothetical situations but in this case let me be clear. If we voted to leave the EU then I would still vote to remain in the UK. I am very pro European and will campaign to remain in the EU. In the disappointing situation of Brexit I would not seek to heap more division on that divisive situation.”

Now it’s Kezia Dugdale of Scottish Labour and Ruth Davidson of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To The SNP Anti-Referendum Party’s turn. We’re sure that if any of their constituents were to drop them a line, they’d be equally forthcoming.

We were having a quiet night in, readers. (Living in a cul-de-sac, it’s quite peaceful here in the evenings, unless we’re hosting a soirée.) We’d just made ourselves a late snack of a tasty baguette – preceded by a small apéritif, and a few canapés serving as hors d’oeuvre – as the au pair is on holiday in Paris this week with the chauffeur, taking in some haute couture.

As we relaxed on the chaise-longue, pondering an indulgent dessert of a chocolate eclair or some crème brûlée, we glanced at Twitter, in the hope of being amused by a few bon mots in the milieu of the internet. Sadly, the reality was a cliché.

We’ve never felt so divorced from the zeitgeist.

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Dismayingly, this magnificent piece of virtuoso television interviewing from last night’s Scotland Tonight doesn’t appear to have been recorded in full splendid isolation for posterity anywhere, so it would be a grave failure of duty on our part not to preserve it for those viewers unfortunate enough to have been otherwise engaged.

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Not so very long ago, someone said this:

Of course, it’s not that day any more.

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SNP tax plans simultaneously raise £300m and lose £900m:

The Guardian’s daily sale in Scotland: 8,700 copies and falling.

A reader directed us today to a tweet by one of the most consistently abusive Tory trolls on social media, slightly concerned about whether his gleeful assertion of a 12% drop in SNP support had any grain of truth to it.

If you’re in a hurry, the short answer is “No”.

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We tried to ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show, presented by Louise White, this morning in order to ask Ruth Davidson a question, but because we’re not Scottish Labour activist Scott Arthur (who appears on air most weeks, including both today’s and yesterday’s shows) we didn’t get picked, as we normally don’t.

It was a shame, as the question we wanted to ask was a good one – and also an entirely genuine one that we honestly don’t know the answer to. Furthermore, it’s a question that applies equally well to all three Unionist party leaders, so we’ll be trying to phone in and ask them too when they in turn appear on the programme.

We rather suspect we won’t get through unless we change our name, though, so if anyone else is interested in the answer perhaps they might like to try their luck too on behalf of everyone, whether it’s on the Radio Scotland phone-in or any other event where the public are allowed to question the leaders.

So the question is below.

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It’s a rare occasion when we feel compelled to salute Scotland’s mainstream media, but their restraint on discovering that a whole slew of PFI schools commissioned by Labour might be in danger of falling down at any moment was highly commendable.

Restricting themselves merely to excising all mention of Labour from their coverage, the press admirably refused to somehow contort the issue into a shape that could be used to attack the SNP.

They kept temptation at bay for a solid 24 hours before they cracked.

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