Wings Over Scotland

The thinktank Reform Scotland is no mouthpiece for the Yes campaign. Wikipedia notes that it’s “a sister organisation to the London-based right-wing, free market think tank Reform”, and in fact it’s closely involved with the forgotten “Devo Plus” campaign group created by politicians from the Unionist parties. Devo Plus itself is endorsed by “Better Together”, to the extent that BT celebrated DP’s birthday last year.

So we were pretty interested when Reform Scotland board member Professor Sir Donald Mackay appeared in today’s Sunday Times rubbishing the UK government’s pessimistic projections for an independent Scotland’s oil revenues, and suggesting that in fact a more realistic figure was more than TWICE the one being claimed by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

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The two arguments heard most often from voters who are leaning towards No (that is, discounting the diehard BritNats who’d vote for the Union no matter what) are “we need more facts” and “we’d like Scotland to be independent but there wouldn’t be the money to pay for it and we don’t want to have higher taxes”.

The first of those is a red herring, successfully propagated by the No campaign with the willing assistance of the media in order to create doubt and fear. There are, by definition, no such things as “facts” about the future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, regardless of whether Scotland votes Yes or No.

The next Westminster election, for example, could easily see the UK vote to leave the European Union by 2017, a change which would beyond question be far more dramatic and disastrous than any plausible outcome of  Scottish independence.

The second argument, though, we can do something about.

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There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.

For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.

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In today’s Scottish Sun:

There’s nothing worse for a parent than your children seeing people as foreigners. We’re sure that Ed’s Belgian father and Polish mother would agree.

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If you’re not familiar with Glasgow, the distance on foot between Shettleston in the city’s east and Maryhill in the west is roughly seven and a half miles. That information will become relevant a few minutes into the video below.

You might want to share it with people.

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There’s a curious piece in today’s Guardian about the Scotstoun area of Glasgow, home to the shipbuilding yard of BAE Systems. It typifies what’s perhaps the most successful and consistent strategy that the No campaign has managed to deploy in the entire independence debate. Let’s listen in.

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Today’s Scottish Daily Express:

We’ve added the red lines.

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Later this morning the Queen will launch a vessel named after herself at the Rosyth naval dockyards. Earlier, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, appeared on the BBC News channel dripping in gold braid and medals to revel in the delivery of his shiny new toy, or at least the hull of it.

(Rather crassly Sir George claimed that it was being given the name of not just the current monarch but “both our Queen Elizabeths”, even though Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elizabeth and the ship itself tactfully avoids adding a “II” on the end.)

In what was an all-round virtuoso display of foot-shooting, the esteemed Admiral was also keen to point out just how few jobs would be supported by HMS Big Grey Floating Car Park – which won’t actually carry any fighter jets until 2020 – noting that “this ship only has 600 people aboard… that is a fraction of previous vessels of this size”.

And that got us to thinking.

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Louise Morton is the Vice Chair of Moray Labour Party. She’s already familiar to some of our more veteran and alert readers for laughing when Yes activists were intimidated out of campaigning at a local fair with threats of violence.

Less than two days after Labour’s hapless candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus resigned for likening some children at a peaceful protest to the Hitler Youth, Ms Morton – whose son Sean is the party’s 2015 candidate for the Moray seat – thought it’d be a wizard jape to tweet this:

It’s like a disease, readers. They can’t keep a lid on their hatred to save their lives.

Jill Stephenson is (or maybe was) Professor Emerita of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh. She was the subject of a substantial profile piece in the Times a couple of months ago on the subject of the independence campaign, which called her “one of the most compelling voices in support of the Union” (as well as somewhat inflating her status to just “Professor Emerita of History”), and therefore we must take her to be a respectable commentator who wouldn’t tell crude flat-out lies.

So we were intrigued to notice the above tweet from yesterday. Can anyone point us to Professor Curtice actually making such a claim? It would surely be significant if the country’s leading (and apparently only) psephologist had indeed said that Yes voters were just a bunch of thickos. At the very least it would somewhat colour his analysis, which we’ve hitherto always considered professional and impartial.

We’ve got to pop out for a bit, so any help would be appreciated.

Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)

The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.

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About 11 minutes and 30 seconds into last night’s Scotland 2014, Labour MP Gemma Doyle repeated one of the strangest arguments Labour use against independence. Having first denied that she’d ever seen any polls suggesting that the people of Scotland wanted to get rid of the Trident nuclear weapons system, she then fell back on the curious but much-used Labour line that getting rid of it would only move it “100 miles or so down the road”, and therefore be pointless.

There are all sorts of glaringly obvious flaws in that argument. One is the de facto case that the UK actually has nowhere else it can put Trident, and therefore if Scotland expels it the rUK will become a non-nuclear-weapons state by default.

The second is that even if there was somewhere for it to go, Scotland still wouldn’t be paying for it any more, which would be a huge benefit to the Scottish budget and a pretty good reason entirely aside from the moral and safety issues.

And the third is that Gemma Doyle doesn’t appear to know where England is.

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