Wings Over Scotland

There are lots of great writers. Even within the professional community, let alone the general public, you’ll have a hard time getting two people to agree on who was the best ever. Was it Shakespeare? Orwell? Joyce? Sega Zone-era Jonathan Davies? The arguments echo timelessly through the ages.

I’ve got many heroes and inspirations of my own – Steven Wells, Miranda Sawyer, Barbara Ellen, Craig Kubey, Rosie Boycott, Douglas Adams and more. (Including the fictional composite entity Lloyd Mangram.)

But the greatest writer of all time is someone whose name I don’t even know, and who to earn the accolade only had to write a single word.

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I originally wrote this piece for a website recently set up by some Labour MPs and MSPs from Scotland, which had solicited contributions from supporters of other parties. The site had attracted a large amount of comments (almost all of them genuine attempts at discussion, rather than jibes) from non-Labour voters, but some readers got very huffy about this “cybernat invasion”.

Sadly, despite asking me to write the piece after I suggested it to them, they’ve declined to publish it, and the site has now taken to deleting comments from non-supporters wholesale. (I had a minor Twitter scuffle with the Labour MP behind the site last night, and he’s turned out to have a very thin skin. One of his posts on the blog was also so mercilessly shredded for inaccurate facts that its entire comments thread has now been deleted.)

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ME: Hey, iTunes! Since you’re so stupefyingly incapable of handling it properly, could you delete all the music off this iPhone so that I can put it back on from scratch, please?

ITUNES: Sure thing, Stuey! I’ll reinstall every one of the 800-odd apps on your iPhone – even though they’re all there already – right now!

ME: No, iTunes! The music! Not the apps! I didn’t ask you to do anything to the apps! There’s nothing wrong with the apps! Just delete the music!

ITUNES: Sorry, Stuey, I’m already busy reinstalling all these hundreds of apps like you asked. Be with you in about 12 hours!

ME: I really, really hate you, iTunes.

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Long-time WoSblog viewers will already be aware that I’ve embraced my gay side when it comes to Eurovision now, thanks to the simple expedient of entering into the spirit and watching it with other people. (If everyone else is even briefly out of the room for some reason I get very twitchy.)

But for those of you still struggling, here are this year’s highlights, with the minimum of campness and the maximum of ROCK!

(NB “Maximum” does not necessarily mean “a lot”.)

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… and someone is brought before me accused of cold-bloodedly murdering the developers of PC iTunes, and the prosecution presents high-definition video evidence of them in the act, and they’re arrested still carrying the brains-covered axe, and the victims have scrawled the full names, addresses and descriptions of their assailants in their own blood on the carpet with their dying breaths, I’ll still find them Not Guilty.

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A more cynical man than I has already suggested that in the event of the SNP winning independence for Scotland, the remnant UK's likeliest flag would be a thoughtful blend of those of its three surviving nations: from England the red cross of St George, and from Wales and Northern Ireland the white backdrops. LOL ETC. I think this, though, would be the obvious real solution:

But is it an issue we're actually going to have to address? Is this really the end of the Union? And what do you call the United Kingdom when it's not united any more? Let's gaze into a crystal ball, then realise we don't believe in fortune-telling and just take a rational look at the facts.

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“…put out the streamers/It’s gonna be a good day for the dreamers.”

It won’t.

Okay, I should probably expand a little on that.

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I don't know, because I'm not going to count them. But if the latest opinion poll is correct (and it's a big "if"), the electoral map of the Scottish Parliament is going to look rather different in two weeks' time:

65 seats are needed for a majority in the Parliament, and the Greens support an independence referendum, so if these figures are accurate the possibility of Scotland seceding from the UK will suddenly get an awful lot more real. And a Tory-led government in Westminster has already seen support for independence surge by almost 50%, to level pegging with those opposed to it.

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Many, many caveats, of course. And a long spoon is clearly required.

But it's hard to class this as anything other than a significant victory. The Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in Scotland, and while it's unlikely to have much direct influence on how people vote, it changes the atmosphere of the election considerably. Game on.

It’s been called the “me-too” election. The Scottish media is full of the widely-repeated wisdom that three of the four main parties contesting the imminent Holyrood poll (the other being the Tories, who nobody votes for in Scotland anyway) have triangulated (ie stolen each other’s policies) to such an extent that there’s almost nothing left to choose between them on ideology, and the election is now just a personality contest.

(Which is tough on at least two of the parties concerned, since their leaders in Scotland have no detectable personalities.)

But is it true?

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Not least because I essentially don’t give a shit about the environment. (The result depicted in the image below is from Scottish Vote Compass, and my non-Scotch chums might find it interesting to take the test too.)

I do believe human activities are causing global warming, and that we’re rendering the planet incapable of sustaining human life at a terrifying rate – via greenhouse gases, pollution and overpopulation – to the point where mankind could in my view have well under 100 years left of anything recognisable as our current lifestyle. It’s just that I think that’s a good thing.

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