Wings Over Scotland

We usually make several tweets about other people’s pro-independence fundraisers, but don’t post them on the main site for several reasons – chiefly that there’s always one going on somewhere, and we don’t want readers to feel unable to visit Wings without being constantly pressured to put their hands in their pockets.

We’re going to have an exception for this one, though. Jack Foster and Chris Silver created the brilliant “Fear Factor” mini-movie (as well as some shorter clips previously), and they want to step things up a gear by making a full-length film about independence in time for the referendum.

We’d very much like that to happen. Jack and Chris are the indy movement’s Adam Curtis, and we’re absolutely certain that their movie would be a fantastic piece of work capable of winning hearts and minds and making a real difference.

They need just over £11,000 in a week – peanuts for the level of quality they produce. The Common Weal fundraiser recently cleared that sort of sum in that sort of timespan, and with much less clear and visible goals, so we hope and trust that it’s achievable. Visit the site to find out more, and please help if you can.

TWO indy-positive stories in the Sunday Times? In the same week?

That needs preserving for posterity.

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It’s always nice when the Scottish media takes the time to illustrate one of our points for us. Earlier this week we attempted to distil this site’s core work of the last two years into two simple rules, elegantly pictured below.

Imagine our unrestricted delight, then, when this weekend’s Scotland On Sunday chose to generously provide us with some prima facie evidence of the phenomenon.

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At 9am today, BBC newsreader Nicholas Owen read out the headlines with the words “The Queen will lead the Remembrance Sunday celebrations – commemorations – at the Cenotaph this morning”. He was right the first time, of course.

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Knock yourselves out, folks. But keep it clean, okay? We had a big dinner.

From the defence white paper “Defence Industrial Strategy”, published in 2005 by the Labour government of Tony Blair. “Onshore” in this context means “in the UK”.

“Shipbuilding and integration: there is no absolute requirement to build all warships and Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels onshore, but a minimum ability to build and integrate complex ships in the UK must be retained.

B2.24 There is no requirement for fabrication of basic structures in the UK per se; however, mounting military operations from the UK base (including the fit of specific equipment for the operation in question), requires the relevant facilities and skills to be available onshore.”

Just out of curiosity, can anyone tell us when those policies changed?

We’ve had a go at this subject once before, but this time we’ve come up with a less hyperbolic analogy. It was sparked by another Twitter comment from Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, which cropped up last night in the middle of some truly abject cringing from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall.

.@bobby_mckail@Dungarbhan@blairmcdougall@Jenemm3 My country is Scotland.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) November 7, 2013

We couldn’t help but note the use of the singular.

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Here’s Johann Lamont at FMQs yesterday:

“Let me repeat: the United Kingdom Government has made it clear that defence contracts will not be let outside the United Kingdom and therefore will not come to Scotland if Scotland were outside the United Kingdom.”

And here’s the UK’s Defence Secretary Philip Hammond speaking on Channel 4 News the previous night. See how clear you think he makes that.

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We’ve only just realised that it’s our official second birthday today. (The technical one, ie when the site went live as a test with some old imported content, was last Friday, but we forgot to mark it, and today in 2011 is the day we published the first-ever post written specifically for Wings Over Scotland.)

In those two years we’ve published 1,680 posts including this one, and the thick end of a million words – 941,426 to be exact – by over 40 different authors. It’s a lot of stuff to take in, especially if you’re fairly new here. (Which you quite probably are, as nearly half of our 100,000+ readers have arrived in the last three months.)

So to mark the anniversary, we thought we’d see if we could distil most of what we’ve written in those 24 months down to just two iron rules, one for each year – in effect, producing a sort of user’s guide to the Scottish and UK media on the subject of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish independence.

We think we’ve managed it.

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We were hoping to come up with a subtler headline than that, but trying to analyse today’s media in fine detail is a bit like trying to translate a complex scientific report from Mandarin into Latin, when it’s taped onto the front of a locomotive that’s hurtling directly towards you at 125mph and you’re standing on the track with a telescope.

There’s horror as far as the eye can see on this morning’s newsstands, but the most despicable and inexcusable is the atrocity of a front page disfiguring the Daily Record. The cover of “Scotland’s Champion” is crammed with falsehoods and idiocy from top to bottom, but that’s not the half of it.

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We’ve been scratching our heads a bit throughout the developing story of BAE’s job cuts in Portsmouth, Glasgow and Rosyth. Not least because it seems Scots are meant to be grateful that the Govan and Scotstoun yards have been “saved”, despite the reality being a huge slice of the workforce being made redundant.

(Curiously, not one story that we’ve been able to find mentions how many are actually employed at the two Clyde docks. We had to go back to 2010 to find out that it’s apparently 4000, meaning that the cuts will be slashing 20% of the yards’ manpower.)

But the strangest thing is something else.

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It’s bleakly appropriate that we found ourselves having this conversation with the former Labour spin doctor and now BBC political pundit John McTernan on the day that BAE announced almost 1800 job losses.

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