Wings Over Scotland

This is “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling’s interview on this morning’s Andrew Marr Show. Despite the sort of respectful-verging-on-subservient treatment the former Chancellor received from Marr, who uncharacteristically couldn’t bring himself to interrupt during the 10-minute piece, Mr Darling blinked even more furiously than usual throughout a bewildering flurry of contradictions, non-sequiturs and outright falsehoods.

Even Marr was driven to remark on the wealthy Labour MP’s agitated state by the end of the piece, and while it’s very hard to keep up, we recorded a total of 777 blinks in 10 minutes with our manual clicker. Have a go yourself – we suspect it would actually be possible to get results 100 either side of that figure.

Of course, maybe Mr Darling is just overdue a trip to SpecSavers.

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By now you may have already seen the headline numbers for our latest Panelbase poll. We hope you don’t mind that we gave the Sunday Times a couple of hours’ lead time in return for some major coverage, but we’ve always said that at this stage the headline numbers are the least interesting findings.

(That’s why our first poll didn’t even bother asking the referendum question.)

We’re actually still waiting on the final full tables for the other 10 questions – we should have them tomorrow – so for now let’s just have a dig around in the top line.

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We appreciate some of you have been struggling to keep up with our investigations into Labour’s devolution proposals. So we’ve boiled it right down.

Our email inbox this week has been packed with people sending in their Labour MP’s or MSP’s responses to our questions about the party’s proposals for the devolution of taxation (aka “Devo Nano”) in the event of a No vote.

With the exception of the very first reply – an arrogant, rude, dismissive effort from Tom Harris – until this evening all of them have been the exact same text except for minor variations in the introductory sentences, with some members choosing to insert little digs at this site but others being more polite to their constituents.

But tonight everything changed.

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When presented with the evidence that Scotland has been a huge net contributor to UK finances ever since the discovery of North Sea oil, Unionists sometimes protest “Ah, but what about the 260 years before that, when Scotland was just a poor wee backwater with no industry that was bankrolled by England after the Darien disaster?”

(Because most of them don’t actually know the first thing about Darien.)

And after this morning’s story, we thought it might be worth checking a few more of the official UK government figures for Scottish revenues and expenditure, up to the point where the Treasury stopped compiling the figures lest they get too embarrassing.

So thanks to yet another alert reader, that’s what we did.

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We noticed a rather unusual story on Conservative Home on Monday. “One in five party members want Scotland to leave the United Kingdom” ran the headline above a piece about a survey the site had conducted.

In fact the title was an understatement – 22% of respondents who were Conservative Party members had answered Yes even to the somewhat loaded proposition “I want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom”.

The numbers got even more dramatic when extended to the site’s readers as a whole (not just signed-up party members), with a whopping 30% agreeing with the statement.

And obviously, there’s something quite interesting about those numbers.

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A Yes vote in the independence referendum would elevate Scotland to the top of the world political agenda for one reason and one reason only: the fact that the UK’s entire nuclear arsenal would unavoidably be located in a foreign country for years. Everything else about the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK – currency sharing, borders, taxation – is subordinate to that simple and critical fact.

The UK’s serious-minded and capable Defence Secretary Philip Hammond told Andrew Marr on Sunday that he “didn’t think” it was he who had told the Guardian, a couple of days beforehand, that Scotland would be able to currency-share with the UK.

You can take that any way you like, but he also pointed out that he’d just spent the week in Washington DC.

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Building into a thrilling partwork!

(When we’ve done all 12 of these we’ll be compiling them into a single massive post for easy reference, but it might have been a bit much to handle in one sudden burst.)

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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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With less than six months to go until the referendum, Scots are turning more of their attention to the debate. Until now it’s largely been the province of politics nerds such as ourselves, but with the vote beginning to loom on the horizon normal people are starting to study the issues more closely.

So we thought it’d be useful to put up a handy reference guide to the core strategy of the No campaign, illuminatingly dubbed “Project Fear” by its own staff. Lacking any positive case for a No vote as Britain suffers through austerity with no end in sight, “Better Together” has by its own admission dedicated itself to terrorising the people of Scotland into sticking with the Union:

“We’re not complacent. But nothing would please the Nats more than us dumping negative campaigning, because they know it works.”

The relentless bombardment of scare stories is so frenetic it can seem overwhelming, but it’s a lot more manageable when you realise that almost everything the No camp says is a variation on one of just 12 basic themes.

So we’ve compiled a catalogue/manual of every fearbomb in their armoury, and alongside each one is the truth that defuses it. Don’t have nightmares.

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It’s Alex Salmond who’s supposed to be the betting man. With regard to his lifelong pursuit of independence he often recites an old verse penned by the Earl Of Montrose:

“He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small,
Who dare not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.”

But as the bookies’ odds continue to tighten on the referendum, the surprise revelation of this week has been that it’s dour, staid, grey old Alistair Darling who’s gambled everything on a needless, reckless punt.

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We haven’t written anything about the Guardian’s explosive story on currency union this weekend, largely because we have nothing much to add to it.

The original piece seems to cover everything pretty well, and just about all we can think of to comment on is the way the BBC and many other newspapers have seemingly deliberately misinterpreted a line of the unnamed minister’s quote, to portray it as a suggestion that there would be a direct trade of a currency union for Scotland continuing to host Trident after independence.

But it’s not the only one of the pillars of the No camp that’s crumbling today.

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