Wings Over Scotland

Well, this is odd.

“A recovery in North Sea oil and gas investment is set to generate £100bn of economic stimulus and hand the Chancellor a £25bn bonus through extra tax receipts, new figures showed on Monday.”
(The Telegraph, 25 February 2013)

“An independent Scotland would begin with a £4 billion black hole in its finances due to a fall in oil revenues, UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said yesterday.”
(The Scotsman, 2 March 2013)

Looks like that Reverse Perception Field at the border is still working, then.

(Apologies to Chomsky and Herman.)

A standard-issue scare story in the Scotsman today was cast in an interesting light following an email we received last night from an alert reader, who’d been contacted by “a business owner in Moray” after the latter received an unsolicited communication from the official “Better Together” campaign.

We’ll let the reader tell the rest of the story.

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Further to our piece of earlier this morning, we present some chilling numbers for your information. They’re some of the votes cast in the last UK general election, in 2010.

(NOTE: No suggestions whatsoever of any kind of moral equivalence between the various parties named below are intended or should be inferred.)

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We’ll be brief about the Eastleigh by-election result.

For all sorts of reasons.

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Look, you knew we’d have to do this. Today’s ruling of the commission investigating SFA/SPL rule breaches by Rangers is almost the closing act in the farcical saga that’s enveloped Scottish football for just over a year since the club went into administration on Valentine’s Day 2012, so we’re nearly finished now.

Nevertheless, Lord Nimmo-Smith’s judgement is so extraordinary and bizarre it simply can’t pass without comment. We gave a gut reaction to it this morning, but it’s in the detail that you really see the contortions into which the Commission was obliged to twist itself in order to let the club off scot-free.

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(I've been meaning to write this piece for months, but – not entirely unrelatedly – have been rather neglecting WoSland in favour of another site whose readers ARE in fact prepared to pay a very modest price for journalism. But what the heck, let's do it now.)

Today has seen the much-trailed worldwide release of Real Racing 3 for the iOS platforms. The controversial "free-to-play" game has a horrendous IAP structure which forces players to have to either wait for hours and hours (and hours) at paywalls between sessions or cough up a mindboggling fortune to play it continuously.

This, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

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In political terms, being an MP is a bit of a poisoned chalice of a job. You ostensibly get elected to represent your constituents, but in reality to represent your party leader. Unless you manage to land yourself a ministerial job you’re basically nothing but a vote on legs, told what to say and ordered through the division lobby by party whips like a ewe in a sheepdog trial, under the constant threat of being overlooked for plum spots on committees or even deselected.

Now don’t worry, readers. Wings Over Scotland isn’t going soft. We have precious little sympathy to spare for career politicians troughing for all they’re worth on a £65,000 salary typically inflated to somewhere comfortably over £100,000 by allowances and perks, and accompanied by incredibly generous redundancy payments and pensions the likes of which us poor saps can only dream of.

But still, it’s no job for anyone with any dignity or self-respect. MPs are loathed by the public more than almost any other profession (other than bankers, with whom most people think they rhyme), very often justifiably so, and most will achieve nothing in their lives other than self-enrichment. It’s a soul-destroying way to get yourself a couple of nice houses at the taxpayer’s expense.

There’s a much less corrosive way to be an MP, though.

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We’ve already asked this question on Twitter (no answers yet), but we should open it up here too. In the light of today’s piece by Stewart Bremner, we’ve been racking our brains trying to think if anyone has moved, in public, from being a Yes vote to a No – or even a Don’t Know – since, let’s say, the SNP’s victory in 2007, the point at which a referendum started to become a real possibility rather than just an abstract concept.

That’s almost six years ago now. Surely SOMEONE must have been won over by the Unionists’ arguments or by the slick, positive, coherent “Better Together” campaign? There’s no shortage of testimonies from people moving, or at least edging, the other way. Even the Sunday Mail is starting to waver a little, for Heaven’s sake.

But we haven’t heard of a single, solitary human in all those six years of intensified constitutional debate who’d previously supported independence having announced to the world that it’s a bad idea and we’re better off in the bosom of Mother UK after all.

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We’re indebted to an alert reader for pointing us towards this intriguing story:

“For knowingly selling paid links, The Scotsman and JP’s regional news sites were not removed from the search results – you can still find The Scotsman’s site if you perform a brand related navigational search. They have however, had their pagerank scores reduced drastically, and Google now trusts them less. The Scotsman’s pagerank dropped from 7 to 3, most of Johnston Press’ regional sites involved had their pagerank reduced to 0.

For the Scotsman website, this is a disaster. Dropping to a pagerank of 3 means that the search engine rankings they used to command for generic searches are gone – most likely for good. So – declining brand-led traffic and negligible Google search traffic for the foreseeable future. No new visitors from Google, and declining brand loyalty. The Scotsman website just became a very tough sell to any potential advertiser.”

Click the words for more details about how an increasingly discredited Scottish mainstream media is resorting to desperate measures to survive, then consider if you might want to fund more honest reporting, lest you be left with none at all.

One of the main weapons in the arsenal of the No campaign is to induce fear in the public over their pensions. It’s a strategy based on the generally inadequate knowledge that most of us have over our pensions, so the “Better Together” coalition has been handing out flyers proclaiming that “the pensions of 1 million Scots are guaranteed by remaining in the UK” – the implication being that outside of the UK they wouldn’t be.

But since we can generally assume the contents of their leaflets to be somewhat economical with the truth, what would happen to our pensions after independence?

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The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:

“Blair Jenkins, the campaign’s chief executive, published [Yes To A Just Scotland] hours after suffering an embarrassing defeat in a mock referendum at Glasgow University, where students rejected independence by a margin of two to one.”

Actual result of referendum: 62-38, a margin of 1.6/1.

Size of Mr Johnson’s casual exaggeration: 25%. (1.6 x 1.25 = 2)

But seriously, though – what is it about believing in the Union that apparently renders educated people suddenly unable to count? We have no idea, but it may go some way to explaining the UK’s credit-rating downgrade.

Today’s press is full of reports on the Glasgow University independence referendum, in which the vote went 62-38 against on a turnout variously reported as 11%, 12% and 13%. (To our considerable surprise, this dismal level of interest was in fact regarded as a triumph, and vastly above the usual amount of engagement with student politics.)

Fewer than 2,600 people voted – despite the ballot being held somewhere students had to go anyway – so the results are barely as authoritative as a typical opinion poll. They do suggest a couple of reasonably interesting things, though.

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