Wings Over Scotland

Below is a short extract from an interview between Margaret Curran and BBC Radio Scotland’s Derek Bateman on Good Morning Scotland last week.

The whole thing is very much worth a listen, but this bit jumped out.

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Following our visit to the Netherlands and Belgium a couple of days ago, and today’s examination of the (non-existent) threat of border controls between an independent Scotland and the rUK, we thought it’d be nice to finish the week with a whistlestop tour of some more of our favourite international borders.

It’s perhaps worth noting that several of these are between EU and non-EU countries, or even between two non-EU countries. The one above, though, is Denmark/Germany.

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This, in case you didn’t see it on our Twitter feed, was on the front page of the Independent website this morning (and indeed still is). It wasn’t a mistake.

The piece featured the Scottish author discussing various pieces of news from the past week (the guest is different every Saturday). Topics included Ed Miliband’s suitability to be Prime Minister (or lack thereof), Stephen King’s objections to e-books, corporate tax avoidance and anonymity for people who’ve been arrested.

But while the paper chose to lead with Scottish independence for its headline, for some reason it didn’t carry a picture of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon or Blair Jenkins, nor even of Rankin himself, whose words the headline comprised.

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Can anyone explain to us the fundamental difference between “I wouldn’t want my son to be a foreigner” and “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry a black man”? Because we’re not at all sure that we can locate it.

We were hunting through a load of 1980s issues of 2000AD earlier today, looking for something else altogether, when we stumbled across this. It seemed somehow timely.

We can’t think why.

We don’t normally pick out individual stories from the Sealand Gazette and put them on the front page, but, well, you’ll see why we’ve done it today in a few seconds’ time.

The piece below is from the Ilford Recorder, a newspaper in north-east London.

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Readers will be aware that while we still link to articles in the Scotsman, we rarely encourage anyone to read pieces by Brian Wilson or Michael Kelly. Both generally issue furious, barely-coherent rants consumed by a blind, absolute tribal hatred of anything in any way connected to the SNP and/or independence, and amount to little more than professional trolling.

We’re not going to make an exception for Wilson’s latest, a spittle-flecked diatribe (fuelled by the Scotsman’s favourite useful idiot Jim Sillars) about how the idea that an independent Scotland could have an open border with the rUK is “ridiculous”, and that there would have to be border controls and passport checks. If you really want to read it you can go and find it for yourself.

But we thought it might be interesting to see if we could find a couple of comparable neighbouring countries (eschewing the obvious example of Ireland, which is for some reason apparently invisible to Unionists) and see how they handled it.

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We thought we might as well actually put figures to the impact of Rangers’ liquidation on the rest of the clubs in the SPL in season 2012-13. So we did. If you don’t want to read another article about football, look away now.

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“World’s biggest wave energy farm off Lewis gets go-ahead” (Herald):

“Edinburgh wave energy developer Aquamarine Power says the project along the coast at Lag na Greine, near Fivepenny Borve, described as one of the best wave energy locations in Europe, could power nearly 30,000 homes.”

“Scotland warned independence could cost billions in renewable subsidies” (Guardian):

“Private sector investors have repeatedly warned that they will reconsider their investments in renewables in the UK if the political environment is perceived to be hostile or policies liable to be revised in future. Many Tory MPs have fuelled this uncertainty through outspoken attacks on renewables and the subsidies for them.”

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This story was on the front page of the Scotsman website when we were checking the papers at 7am. It’s now not only vanished from the front page, but from every index we can find. We tried finding it with the site’s Search function using the words in the headline, but none of them bring it up.

We eventually managed to locate it via Google, hidden two-thirds of the way down the Business page, but in case it gets deleted for good, you can find it below.

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Johann Lamont used to be an English teacher. We presume she was a conscientious and caring educator. We imagine she’s as horrified and embarrassed by this press release from the train-drivers’ union ASLEF yesterday as we are.

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The SNP has been assailed from all directions at once recently on the subject of Corporation Tax in an independent Scotland. Radical left-wingers say there’s no point in independence if we’re just going to ape neoliberal policy. The No camp insists both that a “race to the bottom” would be destructive and counter-productive and morally wrong, and that we wouldn’t be allowed to anyway.

(Even the Tories attack the idea, despite having just stolen it wholesale.)

At the same time, the Scottish Government has been bombarded with criticism for giving grants to companies like Amazon, who received more money in the UK from government handouts than they paid in tax. (Despite the company’s tax avoidance being wholly in the remit of the Westminster government rather than the Holyrood one.)

We don’t mind telling you, readers, we’re a bit confused.

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