Wings Over Scotland

The concluding episode of STV’s “Road To Referendum” was almost a one-stop repository of some of the most compelling arguments for independence. Not because of anything in the show’s own script, nor even any of the interviews with the Yes camp, but rather the contributions of the Unionist side.

Whether it was Willie Rennie’s cluelessness, Jack McConnell’s revolting attempt to misrepresent the views of a dying international statesman, Michael Kelly’s reference to the Scots as “they” or Jim Murphy’s misplaced arrogant complacency, the programme showcased some of the least attractive aspects of the anti-independence movement.

The ugliest bug at the ball, though, was the UK’s Prime Minister.

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First you let them hatch, then you count them, and then they come home to roost.

Continuing our series of favourite extracts from last night’s “Road To Referendum”, here’s Labour’s delightful Trident advocate Jim Murphy, speaking in May 2010.

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Here’s the Labour diehard, former Lord Provost of Glasgow and regular Scotsman columnist, Michael Kelly, on last night’s concluding episode of “Road To Referendum”:

As befitting a tribal dinosaur of the old Scottish political school, Kelly popped up to proffer a vintage line that’s fallen out of favour with the No campaign, namely that Scotland is too wee and too poor to go it alone. But it was something else he said in the same segment that caught our ear.

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Willie Rennie made a bit of an idiot of himself last night. He appeared towards the end of the final instalment of Iain Macwhirter’s largely-excellent STV documentary “Road To Referendum”, with the empirically wrong assertion (in the name of the fabled “positive case for the Union”) that “the National Health Service is a United Kingdom institution, it was created by United Kingdom people.”

This, as alert Wings Over Scotland readers will know in some detail, isn’t true. The NHS has never been a “United Kingdom institution”. From the first day of its creation, it was two independent institutions – the Scottish NHS and the English/Welsh NHS.

(It’s now four separate national bodies – Northern Ireland having its own service, with a different name and different responsibilities, and the Welsh NHS having been “divorced” from the English one and devolved to the Assembly in 1999.)

To the Scottish Lib Dem leader’s embarrassment, the NHS therefore proves the exact opposite of what he’s trying to use it to prove – namely, it shows that Scotland can deliver better health services for its people (free prescriptions, personal care, eye tests, dental check-ups, hospital parking) via independence, yet still co-operate smoothly and productively with the rUK where necessary without the sky falling in.

But Rennie’s clanger triggered off another interesting exchange.

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We almost feel sorry for the UKIP candidate for Aberdeen Donside, poor Otto Inglis. All day today he’s been pictured on news bulletins standing silently like a spare object at a wedding while broadcasters interviewed his party’s leader Nigel Farage instead.

Then again, after the brutal shoeing Mr Farage took from STV’s Bernard Ponsonby this evening, perhaps Mr Inglis will be feeling he got the best end of the deal.

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Last night’s extended edition of Newsnight Scotland was a special “no men allowed” independence debate. Unlike last week’s Question Time, the BBC at least offered a panel comprising equal representation from both sides, and one of the panellists was Amanda Harvie, introduced as a business consultant and former chief executive of a financial-services industry body, Scottish Financial Enterprise.

Ms Harvie claimed (around 42m into the programme) that she wasn’t an official ‘Better Together’ representative, “nor do I speak for a political party – I’m a businesswoman”. But an alert reader noticed that she looked a lot like another Amanda Harvie.

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That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:

The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.

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Sorry, folks – dealing with a major unforeseen disaster today. Nothing to do with the site, and nobody’s dead or dying or anything, but it’s probably going to take all day to clean up the mess. See you tomorrow.

Looks like we’ve got another difference of opinion, Geoffrey.

“The late Brian Adam, whose untimely death has prompted the by-election, won with just under 56 per cent of the vote two years ago with nearly two votes to Labour’s one.

But a lot has changed since Adam’s glory night. Then, a popular and charismatic SNP, which had pragmatically negotiated four years of minority rule at Holyrood, was rewarded with an epic victory across Scotland. Now, facing pressure over its preparations for independence, and carrying the burden of a monopoly on power, it is a very different world.

Alex Salmond’s stratospheric popularity ratings of two summers ago have dipped back to earth. Labour is, once again, snapping at the SNP’s heels.”

That’s the Scotland On Sunday view (in an article which appears to be littered with several troublingly major factual errors, such as claiming the Aberdeen bypass is “still in the courts” when it isn’t, and asserting that numerous very real and operational institutions haven’t been built yet when they rather visibly have).

But the Sunday Herald is getting quite different vibes from its people on the ground.

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Because they can’t both be.

“Scotland sees rise in number of race hate cases“

(Headline in today’s Scotsman.)

“Overall, however, there was a decrease in both racist and religiously aggravated offending in Scotland”

(Actual text of the same article.)

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We’re naturally nosy sorts, and with literally tens of thousands of readers having come to the site since our first major reader poll, we’ve decided it makes more sense to keep it open permanently so that new users can express their views too.

So if you only took part in the more recent second one, now’s your chance to tell us what you think about a whole range of subjects. And if you’re too new to have even voted in that one (or just forgot, or couldn’t be bothered), we’ve merged it into the first one, so you can do both at once if you like.

The poll can now be found under “Survey” in the top menu bar, and is here.

So, everyone turned up for Question Time in the end. We expected no different. As far as we can ascertain, the view in the pro-independence community was that the SNP’s Angus Robertson acquitted himself well as the sole political representative of the Yes campaign, and it was interesting and welcome to see journalist Lesley Riddoch (who was also assured and compelling) actually nail her colours to the Yes mast too.

But what of the show itself? Were the fears of independence supporters justified, or did the BBC mount an impeccable exercise in impartiality? Let’s find out.

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