Wings Over Scotland

"McBride told the Sunday Herald he had resigned over the party’s hostility to the SNP’s bill on tackling sectarianism in football."

The resignation of the leading QC is the first sign of a crack in the Unionist parties' united front in opposition to the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill, which is likely to pass without any cross-party support. Oddly, neither Labour, the Lib Dems or the Tories have as yet offered any amendments to the bill, despite variously criticising it as rushed, impractical and dangerous. But with what could be a fight to the wire coming up for control of Labour-held Glasgow City Council next May, it's hardly surprising that nobody wants to frighten the large number of Old Firm voters in the city when they can instead blame the SNP for a bill which sections of both the Rangers and Celtic supporters have attacked, for fear it might criminalise the singing of their favourite traditional ballads of Irish history.

The Scotsman presents a deeply twisted spin on the latest Scottish constitutional poll today as their headline story. Under the headline "SNP under pressure as Scots back change", they report the TNS poll for the BBC which shows the results of a three-option either-or question asking voters to pick their favourite from the status quo, devo max and independence. The poll essentially shows a three-way tie, but the paper reports it highly misleadingly, particularly in this passage:

"…independence, support for which, according to the poll, has fallen 11 percentage points from the 39 per cent backing in a survey published in September."

The September poll being referenced, however, asked a radically different question – it offered respondents just two options, independence or the status quo, with no devo-max. It's hardly surprising that independence scored higher in a two-option poll than a three-option one (the status quo did too), and as such the Scotsman's interpretation borders on an outright lie. Even by their normal standards, it's an unusually clumsy and blatant effort at misrepresenting the reality.

In fact, as quietly noted by the Herald in the middle of a piece on new Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, "The nearest comparison with the latest poll was a three question one by Ipsos-Mori a year ago which had 22% for independence, 44% for more powers and 32% for no change." In other words, the BBC survey represented support for independence growing significantly, at the expense of both devo max and the status quo – the exact opposite of the Scotsman's spin.

It's also interesting that a poll showing devo max as – albeit narrowly – the most popular option is described by the paper as putting the SNP under pressure. The SNP have repeatedly expressed their willingness to include a question on devo max in the forthcoming referendum, while all the opposition Unionist parties oppose one. It is they, not the SNP, who are refusing to countenance offering the people the thing they continue to favour the most, and one might imagine that it would be they rather than the nats who would therefore be placed under pressure by this poll.

Iain Macwhirter in the Herald with a much-needed skewering of the "cybernat myth" that Labour have doggedly been trying to make stick for a few years now, and which was escalated dramatically with Iain Gray's vitriolic and bitter farewell speech to the Scottish Labour conference. There is, of course, poison aplenty on both sides of the SNP-Labour divide, but the most immediately noticeable difference is that nationalist bile and trolling comes from a few anonymous nutjobs on messageboards, whereas in Labour's case it comes from elected members and official representatives. We don't recall any SNP MSP comparing the Labour leader to Hitler, Mussolini or Mugabe, nor calling the entire party "neo-fascists", yet those insults and more have all been made in full public view by taxpayer-funded Labour politicians. Gray and Labour's attempt to claim the moral high ground is an extraordinary piece of brass neck, and it's good to see a grown-up journalist calling it out.

In September 2011, a group of US state employees took a man called Troy Davis from his prison cell in Atlanta, Georgia to a small room and strapped him to a gurney. They inserted a needle into one of his veins, hooked it up to some tubes connected to a machine and pressed a button on the machine, knowing that it would cause lethal chemicals to be pumped into his bloodstream until he died of asphyxiation.

These people – every one of whom doubtless considered themselves an ordinary, decent, caring member of society – participated willingly in the killing despite knowing that there was an enormous degree of doubt as to whether Davis was in any way responsible for the death of the man in whose name he was being executed.

Bafflingly, very few people found this behaviour at all odd.

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[7] The Independent: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook7

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[42] Hansard/YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook42

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[46] Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook46

[47] Daily Mail: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook47

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[49] Money Observer: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook49

[50] National Pensioners’ Convention: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook50

[51] Various: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook51

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[54] “Better Together” http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook54

[55] The Telegraph: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook55

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[70] BBC: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook70

[71] The Spectator: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook71

[72] The World Bank: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook72

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[74] STV News: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook74

[75] The Guardian: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook75

[76] The Huffington Post: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook76

[77] Scottish Parliament: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook77

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[79] The Scottish Sun: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook79

[80] European Commission: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook80

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[89] The Herald: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook89

[90] BBC: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook90

[91] RTE: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook91

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[93] Holyrood Magazine: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook93

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[131] YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook131

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[134] BBC: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook134

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[140] Write To Them: http://tinyurl.com/weebluebook140

Start from this premise: all things are possible.

You have an advantage over me, English viewers. The chances are that most of you pay very little attention to Scottish politics, so your heads probably aren't spinning like mine still is at the staggering, incomprehensible magnitude of what's just been achieved. But I'll do my best to paint you a picture.

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Readers of a spiritual or elderly bent may be aware of the parable of the Deck Of Cards. (You can listen to a splendidly reverby take of Wink Martindale’s definitive version by clicking this convenient link here.)

But you don’t have to go back to the 1950s for a similarly instructive metaphor for the contemporary age. Because the iOS game Coin Dozer serves, if you don’t want to carry around a bulky copy of Das Kapital, as a bible of the modern capitalist world. Shut up, it’s not bollocks.

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THESE ARE SOME OBJECTS AND SITUATIONS THAT I HAVE RECENTLY SEEN.

"Warning: autistic driver" signs? Is that a thing now? Exactly what might be the implications of autism for other road users?

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This is totally NSFW, if you’re a dragonfly. It may also cause depression among male viewers. If you’re absolutely sure you can handle XXX-rated dragonfly action, then click on the pleasant picture below to peek through the leafy window and into the dragonfly boudoir.

(Pics taken this afternoon in the botanical gardens of Victoria Park, Bath, with a Fuji Finepix F70 EXR compact digital camera.)

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If a week is a long time in politics, 26 months is forever, right?

“This talk of alliances comes up a lot, doesn’t it? Everyone wants
to be in our gang. So I want to make something very clear today.

Will I ever join a Conservative government? No.

Will I ever join a Labour government? No.

I will never allow the Liberal Democrats to be a mere annex to
another party’s agenda.”

– Nick Clegg’s first speech as leader to the Lib Dem conference, March 2008

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When the ugly duckling becomes the swan.

Hats off to you, Dan Parks.

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Does ANYONE understand them? Depressingly it seems not.

If you're joining us late, many years ago there existed a thing oft bemoaned by fans and pundits alike, called the "professional foul". This was a cynical deliberate foul, typically committed by a lumbering centre-half when he'd been skinned by a forward who was then heading clean through on the goalkeeper, but still a long way from goal. The centre-half would blatantly haul him down, making no pretence at a legal attempt to win the ball, and give away a harmless free kick perhaps 30 or 40 yards out.

The forward would thus be denied a chance to go one-on-one with the keeper and very likely score. The defender, meanwhile, would suffer only a yellow card at most – because his foul was in itself usually innocuous (being a simple trip or shove), leaving the referee no grounds on which to issue a red. It was clearly unfair, and something had to be done.

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