Wings Over Scotland

As several people have been asking in the comments, we’re sticking this on the front page to make things easier for everyone. Kindly reader Ken McDonald (not the BBC’s one, we think) has rather generously designed and commissioned some spiffy Wings car stickers entirely off his own bat, and is offering them up for free. Though we’d hope you’d all be considerate enough to send him a stamped addressed envelope.

Just drop him an email and you can sort out the details.

We got an email last night with regard to yesterday’s piece about a bizarre story in the Daily Record. We thought it was worth sharing with you. The emphasis is ours.

“I’m a lawyer and many years ago worked for the Scottish Office drafting ‘exchange cover’ contracts to deal with fluctuations in the value of currencies between parties from different countries. Sometimes the contract dealt with Swiss Francs, sometimes Deutschmarks or US Dollars and so on.

From what you have printed in your article, it seems that this is not such a contract but it does the same job another way. It makes the person sending the invoice (the contractor) send all their bills to the Scottish Government in one currency only – the pound Sterling. It also provides that they will only receive payment in Sterling. 

In other words it’s an affirmation of the use of Sterling now and in the future by the Scottish Government. I don’t know who the ‘top’ lawyer alluded to is but he or she is talking mince.

Regards, 
George Gebbie
Faculty of Advocates.”

(“Mince” is an obscure legal term. You wouldn’t understand.)

That’s the best you’re getting for a 10 o’clock joke tonight, we’re afraid. We’ve been beavering away expanding the Reference page this evening, with the result that it now contains a new section – the Repository, which is a collection of various documents pertaining to the independence debate we’ve accumulated over time and which we’ve now stuck in one place for easy finding, should you need to refer to them.

The White Paper is in there, of course, along with many of the other papers of non-specific colours released by both the Yes and No campaigns, various reports by government and independent bodies, some old election manifestos, the full text of the McCrone Report and all sorts of other stuff. If you’ve got anything that you think should be in there, send us a link in the comments and we’ll upload it.

As we’re a day behind due to Saturday’s technical catastrophe, and Chapters 12 and 13 of “The Claim Of Scotland” are unhelpfully titled, let’s give you a wee bonus and have a double helping of could-have-been-written-yesterday 46-year-old history.

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Gah. Why is it that any time we’re ever vaguely nice about the Daily Record in public, they immediately pull an idiotic stunt like this and make us look like chumps?

Watch and marvel, readers, as a headline disintegrates in front of your very eyes.

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It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.

So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.

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The only way never to be caught out, it’s said, is to always tell the truth, because then you never have to worry about remembering which lies you told to who. And since we’d be lying if we told you that we weren’t enjoying watching the No campaign’s catalogue of falsehood beginning to turn in on itself, as one lie attacks another, we won’t bother.

The UK government’s dramatic debt announcement this week may have marked the opening of the floodgates. Because, to complete this appalling car-crash of mixed metaphors, the whole rotten edifice is starting to crumble down about their ears.

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Our undercover mole in the No campaign got in touch last night to apologise for the fact that he hadn’t sent us much recently. It turned out he’d been hastily despatched to foreign lands to supervise the setting up of “Better Together Moscow”. But he managed to smuggle its first piece of work out to us inside a diplomatic bag.

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This is hereditary Westminster Labour MP Anas Sarwar in yesterday’s Evening Times:

“Now, it’s been said by some that there is no passion in the case that we are better together as part of the United Kingdom.

Well, the people saying that obviously haven’t been at any of the rallies I have been at across Scotland, and where I spoke about an idea much bigger than independence; the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK for the benefit of everyone in the UK.”

Hang on – “rallies”? Were we watching the wrong channel when we missed the tens of thousands of people packing the streets for the Great Rally Of The Union? Were we passed out in a cupboard for the whole time when the Anas Sarwar Evangelical Roadshow filled football stadia in every corner of the land with crazed disciples waving Union Jacks and chanting “POOL AND SHARE! POOL AND SHARE!”?

Rallies? What on Earth is the truth-averse wee twerp talking about? We need a doctor.

Alert readers will already know how cranky we can get about badly-formatted comments, which waste a lot of our time and are disrespectful to other readers. In fairness, however, our shonky comments plugin didn’t help. So after much poking around we’ve switched to a new, sleeker system. It’ll be second nature to anyone with experience of HTML, but for everyone else here’s a simple pictorial guide.

(Click the image to enlarge.) There are numerous other HTML tags in existence, but the <i> and <b> ones should be plenty for most purposes – don’t go mad making everything purple and different fonts. The new preview pane below the actual comment box shows you exactly how your comment will appear before you hit Submit, so now if you post one with no paragraph breaks in it there isn’t a court in the land that would convict us for smashing your head in with a jagged rock.

That is all.

Chapter 11 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

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We’re quite keen to peruse the results of this poll, which was conducted a few days ago by YouGov alongside their World War 1 one, but hasn’t yet published.

We got in touch, but the company was unable to tell us when, or whether, the responses to this question (and some others about independence, along with some on Welsh education) would be made public. It doesn’t seem like the kind of question that would be particularly useful as a piece of private polling, so keep your eyes peeled.