This is Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Eddie Bone of the Campaign for an English Parliament in a remarkable nine minutes of “Good Morning Scotland” this morning.
It’s the nearest to sounding like a Yes voter you’ll ever hear James Naughtie. Enjoy.
There’s something fascinating about the latest “No Thanks” leaflet that’s slithering its way through letterboxes in Scotland this week, and it’s not the empty sloganising it deploys in lieu of an argument. (“We’re better together because best of both worlds!”)
It’s this graph.
This story from earlier this month is now the third most-read in Wings history. But there was an aspect of the revelations in the Future Of England survey that we didn’t touch on, and it’s worth picking up now.
And that’s quite an interesting finding, because it means that Scottish Labour – the self-proclaimed “party of devolution” – now actually wants LESS tax-raising power for the Scottish Parliament than just about anyone else anywhere in the entire UK.
Here’s “Better Together” chief Blair McDougall in today’s Herald:
Let’s just read that through again. He’s saying that his campaign can’t use “love of our country” as a campaign weapon because people on both sides love their country. So instead he’s going to use “love of our families” as a distinguishing characteristic.
The only possible conclusion that can be drawn from those statements is that Yes supporters don’t love their families. It’s a bold gambit, we’ll give him that.
Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.
We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.
(Help keep this vital news outlet broadcasting here.)
The website of the Dumfries & Galloway Conservative Party yesterday:
Perhaps they read the press coverage of the Salmond-Darling debate later on.
We almost forgot to mention this.
Not for the first time, readers, you’ve left us gobsmacked sideways. Despite previous successes we were a little apprehensive about this latest fundraiser, as people have been getting asked for a lot of money by a lot of groups in recent months, and we were a bit worried that everyone might have donation fatigue or simply be skint.
That apprehension lasted two and a half hours.
The key exchange on currency from last night’s debate:
At the end of the clip, a flustered Darling finally blurts out what the No camp have been trying not to admit for the entire campaign: “Of course we could use the pound”.
Unionists and journalists are now frantically spinning that they’d never denied such a thing. But we know that’s not true, and nobody got left with more egg on their face than Mr Darling’s supposed superior, Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont.
Things you’ll never hear a Scottish interviewer say.
Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.
He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
