Wings Over Scotland

Well, at least now I know how a bullet feels when it gets fired from a gun.

I got home on Saturday evening, and started with a wander around the former social-housing estate where my parents live, now bisected by walls and fences and hedges where people bought their houses under Right To Buy and privatised wee patches of once communal ground. The policy clearly didn’t bring the Tories the gratitude they’d hoped for. Somewhat to my surprise I counted 21 Yes houses to 3 No.

The next day I went to Glasgow.

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Hello. Some of you will know me, but most of you won’t. That’s alright. That’s not important. All you have to know right now is that I’m just like you. We may well be on different sides in this referendum race – I’m on team Yes – but we are the same.

I come from a working-class family, in a working-class area of Glasgow. My father worked for Glasgow City Council in the Parks department, and I followed him there and spent seven years out cutting grass, planting flowers, picking up litter and raking leaves in the rain.

I joined the Labour Party when I was 17, and was a trade union activist a year later. I was a local branch chair at 21, and I was proud to have worked alongside the team at Keir Hardie House to deliver a Labour government in 1997. The Labour Party was my second home.

In 2001 I decided to go to university, so I signed up for night school and for a year I went religiously, doing three subjects a week on top of my job. I passed them all and chose Stirling, where I quickly became involved in student union politics. In my first campaign for an executive post I was tagged one of “Blair’s Poodles”. I wore my party colours on my sleeve.

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An interesting piece in the Herald today:

Right there, in just two sentences, the spirit of the Union: English people think they should have been allowed to force the Scots to remain in the UK against their will.

If 70% of English people voted against independence (or even in fact, if just 70% of the 56% who think they should have had a vote did), it would have vastly outweighed even 100% of Scots voting Yes. That, readers, is the respect the people of England have for Scottish self-determination and democracy. Every single Scot could have voted for independence, and England’s view is that they should have been able to, and would, force Scotland to stay in the UK.

We’re just going to leave it at that.

The below appears to be Magnus Gardham’s column in today’s Herald.

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Yeah, okay, we know the joke doesn’t quite work because the spelling’s not right. But there’s already plenty of comedy in the fact that Richard Branson is the latest celebrity to sign up to the No camp. Why?

That’s why. Still, bless ’em for trying.

An extraordinary letter sent out to members by trade union USDAW this week:

It’s not extraordinary that the union should choose to take a No position. It’s perfectly entitled to do that, and to advise its members of its view. It’s the last paragraph that blows us away. Not just the ironic juxtaposition of “Don’t let others decide what is best for you” with a direct instruction as to which way to vote, but the suggestion that “if you don’t know – then you should vote NO”.

Call us old-fashioned, but our reaction to not knowing something important is to try to find out. USDAW could have said “If you don’t know, here are some sources of information from both sides that you might find helpful” and added a couple of links to, at the very least, the Scottish Government’s white paper and the UK government’s “Scotland Analysis” reports.

Instead, it tells its members to remain ignorant and just do what they’re told. We can’t be alone, surely, in finding that a truly tragic place for the proud and honourable trade union movement of these islands to have found itself in.

Former Labour spindoctor Charlie Whelan in the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald:

Click to enlarge as Whelan segues seamlessly from terrible Scottish “nationalism” to racial genocide in Auschwitz, because, you know, Yes voters are all basically Nazis*.

*George Galloway’s comments (made in his capacity as a nominated representative of “Better Together”) from yesterday’s BBC “Big Big Debate” were edited out of the broadcast version. We’re sure it was just to keep the running time tight.

This is astonishing. From tonight’s BBC 6 O’Clock News:

Nick Robinson claims Alex Salmond “didn’t answer” his question at a press conference earlier today. That is a brazen and quite spectacular lie. The First Minister gave the BBC man a detailed and direct response which lasted for over three minutes BEFORE raising the matter of the Treasury link. You can see that response for yourself below.

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Earlier today we showed you a clip from a press conference in which Alex Salmond schooled the BBC’s Nick Robinson in some basic financial facts about Corporation Tax, and went on to make a serious allegation about wrongdoing between the BBC and the UK Treasury, in which he claimed that the latter had broken Parliamentary rules by leaking market-sensitive information about RBS.

The BBC dutifully reported the story later in the day.

And as far as we can gather, the First Minister has everyone bang to rights.

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Who’s this? A bunch of lairy, pissed-up neds on a stag weekend?

Nope. Labour members of the Scottish and UK Parliaments, out “campaigning” in Glasgow today. This is their job. You’re paying them to do this. Be proud, 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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