Wings Over Scotland

79%. That’s how far into the referendum campaign we are, assuming we take the start date as 6 May 2011, when the SNP secured the historic majority that ensured the people of Scotland would be given their first-ever vote in over 300 years on whether their ancient nation should be incorporated into another.

We don’t know about you, readers, but for all the woeful bleating from the parties of the Union about the length of the debate as they woke up to the full reality of their defeat, for us it’s flown by. We can scarcely believe that nearly four-fifths of the allotted time have already passed, and as 2014 looms just a few dozen hours away we’re about to enter the final 20%.

2013, though, was the year Wings Over Scotland became our full-time job, and it would be remiss of us not to use this last bit of quiet time to take a wee glance backwards over the momentous 12 months that are just ending.

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What a week it’s been for respect. Here’s today’s Telegraph:

Maybe when you’re on holiday it doesn’t count or something.

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We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.

The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.

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Looks like the dastardly SNP have succeeded in digging that giant trench from the Solway to the Tweed and sailing Scotland off towards its Nordic neighbours. Poor England, according to tomorrow’s Mail, is now an island.

We have a feeling, readers, that the Scottish edition won’t be carrying that headline.

Since we’re talking about The Independent today, we thought those of you who don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook might like to see their latest editorial cartoon.

No, we’re not making that up.

The Independent is the most English newspaper in Britain. Alone among the nationals, it has neither a Scottish edition nor even a Scottish news section. And for the vast majority of the time, it acts as though Scotland simply doesn’t exist at all. (Or, perhaps, as if Scotland was already independent and therefore none of its business.)

So it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that on the rare occasions it dares venture north of Luton, it invariably makes a gigantic ham-fisted hash of it.

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We weren’t going to post today, but we couldn’t let this one just sneak past under the cover of Christmas, because the way the story has evolved this week says so much about how the pro-Union media operates and what we’re up against.

That’s the delightful Fraser Nelson, unfathomably-accented editor of right-wing commentary magazine The Spectator and the living embodiment of our own Sir Jock Finlay-Urquhart-Duncan in his youth. A couple of days ago Mr Nelson wrote the most extraordinary leader column for the magazine, and then things unfolded.

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One day is all it takes. Happy Christmas, readers.

Our more downmarket readers may have noticed this piece in today’s Scottish Sun:

But we were tickled to learn this morning, from a very well-placed inside source, that the advertising agency involved had also (genuinely) presented as part of their report a graphic demonstrating the current public perception of the No campaign.

You can see it below.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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We’ve read a lot in the past few days about how referendum polling basically hasn’t moved at all this year. But we weren’t sure if that was really true. So with nine months to go, it seemed a reasonable idea to check the stats for the LAST nine months and see if any progress was being made.

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A tweet from SNP MSP Marco Biagi caught our eye yesterday:

It’s a fun little morale-booster, especially when you note that the 2011 poll came just TWO months before the election, whereas there are still NINE months left to turn round the No camp’s steadily-shrinking lead on the referendum. But we found something even more fun when we were checking back on the stats.

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