Wings Over Scotland

Today’s might read something like this:

“In a huge boost for the independence campaign, Royal Bank of Scotland today announced that it would move its registered office from Edinburgh to London in the event of a Yes vote. First Minister Alex Salmond was reported to be delighted that the possible future burden of having to bailout the failed bank had been lifted from the shoulders of the Scottish Government.

(The threat was in fact a mythical one, as bank bailouts are not conducted on the basis of head-office location, but had frequently been rolled out as a scare story by the anti-independence campaign.)

With RBS unlikely to pay any Corporation Tax for decades on account of its gargantuan and ongoing losses from the financial crash, there was no downside for Holyrood, with the bank stating unambiguously in a letter to employees that it had ‘no intention to move operations or jobs’.

(Corporation Tax is in any event levied on where business activity takes place, not where the headquarters is located.)

In other words, an independent Scotland would keep all the benefits of the bank – employment, services and employee taxation and spending – with none of the dangerous liabilities. The news will encourage businesses to invest in the Scottish economy, knowing that their money is secure. The outcome would give an independent Scotland the best of both worlds.”

Just imagine it, viewers. Maybe one day.

Yesterday the three UK party leaders all came to Scotland to “campaign”. None of them would appear in public or be interviewed on TV, speaking only to small crowds of invited supporters before scurrying south again. Nevertheless, their fleeting presence north of the border meant that the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions was conducted by substitutes. Standing in for David Cameron was William Hague.

So that’s all a bit clearer now.

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Here’s an image we made back in October 2012:

It’s based on a graphic from the movie version of “V For Vendetta”.

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George Monbiot in the Guardian, 10 September 2014:

“If Scotland becomes independent, it will be despite the efforts of almost the entire UK establishment. It will be because social media has defeated the corporate media. It will be a victory for citizens over the Westminster machine, for shoes over helicopters.

It will show that a sufficiently inspiring idea can cut through bribes and blackmail, through threats and fear-mongering. That hope, marginalised at first, can spread across a nation, defying all attempts to suppress it. That you can be hated by the Daily Mail and still have a chance of winning.”

We could have picked almost any paragraph. A tour de force.

We’ve long argued that whatever the small print, when it comes to an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union common sense and realpolitik will prevail, because nobody wants Scotland to be out of the EU for even a day and it’s in nobody’s interests for it to be.

Of course, we’re just some idiots with a website and nobody should listen to OUR opinion about anything. But it seems as though people like Graham Avery (Honorary Director-General of the European Commission), Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, (the former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN) and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, (author of a book on EU constitutional law and professor of European law and human rights at Oxford University) ought to have a pretty good inside track on Europe stuff.

And if all those still aren’t enough, how about the esteemed Pat Cox, former President of the European Parliament? He ought to know what he’s talking about, right?

Between this, and this.

We just watched, jaws agape, as the BBC news channel gave Scottish Labour an uninterrupted 50-minute party political broadcast for no immediately obvious reason. It mainly took place at Loanhead Miners’ Welfare, and featured speeches from a warm-up man, then Johann Lamont, and finally Gordon Brown.

The ostensible event justifying this extraordinary coverage lasted just 2m 36s.

And having sat through the whole circus, we still have no idea what it was for.

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First Owen Jones’ stinging rebuff to the odious fauxcialist John McTernan, now this:

As another famous Unionist might say: Oooft!

The alert readers of this site have encountered currency trader Alpesh Patel of equity company Praefinium Partners before. We were more than a little bit scathing about a previous appearance of his on the BBC News channel back in February, on which it seems fair to say that he nailed his Unionist colours very firmly indeed to the mast.

So this clip from the same channel this morning was interesting.

We don’t think his words need any comment from us, save perhaps that we commend Mr Patel for having learned from his previous errors when it comes to assessing the attitude of businesses to the prospect of Scottish independence. Anyone can make a mistake. The key is to not keep repeating it when the evidence proves you wrong.

You have to laugh.

Anyone would think WE were the ones who’d had to remove, apologise for and pay compensation for defamatory articles about THEM.

Save it from what, exactly? Democracy?

(More here.)