Wings Over Scotland

If you’ll forgive one of my very rare switches to the first-person view, readers, I’ve found the last few days in the independence referendum particularly weird.

That’s because my current life is curiously mirroring my previous one as a videogames journalist. The gaming community is at present mired in a convulsive orgy of the most mindboggling horror over something called “GamerGate”, which I couldn’t even begin to decribe adequately to you, because frankly you wouldn’t believe me and I’m not sure the words exist to do it justice anyway.

By way of illustration of that fact, this article on games website VG24/7 is, genuinely, by far the best, most accurate summary and analysis of the situation that I’ve read. (Twitter followers will already have seen me tweet a couple of random samples of what’s going on. I urge you, if you can, to endure the entirety of that second link, and note that it’s had almost FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND views.)

But while proving that the sort of abusive insanity pervading the world of videogames makes even the absolute worst of indyref name-calling look like two kittens with woolly hats on having a meow-off over who gets first shot at a saucer of milk, the core principles are the same – a tiny handful of total boneheads having their actions blown out of all proportion by the press in a shock-horror frenzy bearing no relation to the actual experiences of 99.9% of people.

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Last week I was working in the tattoo studio and got chatting to a client on whom my colleague was completing a large, Japanese-style sleeve on his upper arm and chest. He was sitting upright in his chair, stripped to the waist, his new ink glowing.

We got talking about the referendum. Unusually, this guy was a No voter. I say ‘unusually’ because the vast majority of our clients in the studio are vocally keen Yes types. Perhaps there’s something in the inked person’s character – a bohemian or experimental quality that naturally favours thoughts of change or progression.

This guy was a very nice, friendly, middle-aged small business owner from North Lanarkshire. As a Yes voter, I try not to get too preachy on the subject in the studio simply because it wouldn’t be professional – I wouldn’t want to get into any kind of heated debate with someone I have to tattoo for hours on end.

Still, I lightly prodded him on some of the independence issues. I was curious to hear his perspective as I rarely encounter it in someone face to face.

“Bad for business”, he mumbled in an offhand way. “I just don’t like the sound of it”

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Earlier today we bemoaned some chump throwing an egg at Jim Murphy this week during his Shouting At Old Ladies In Shopping Centres Tour of Scotland, thereby enabling the Scottish press to enjoy an easy orgy of hypocritical “cybernat”-baiting. Murphy has unsurprisingly made the most of the incident, suspending the tour and bizarrely alleging that Yes Scotland is directly co-ordinating the abuse.

Egg-throwing is of course an act of protest rather than violence, and reactions to it tend to depend on whether you support the politics of the “victim” or not. (After all, the entire point of using an egg is that it’s fragile and breaks on impact, making a mess but doing no damage – insult rather than injury.)

This long-standing form of protest was treated as a national joke when someone did it to John Prescott – as was his actually violent reaction – and we don’t seem to remember anyone minding too much when it happened to Nick Griffin.

(For all his vileness, Griffin was a democratically elected politician just as Murphy is.)

Now, we actually have no way of knowing that this week’s culprit was a real Yes supporter rather than a stooge – it seems odd that with Murphy surrounded by so many Labour goons at every event and in a very public place, nobody managed to apprehend or photograph the assailant. But let’s apply Occam’s Razor and assume for the purposes of this piece that they were a genuine disgruntled opponent.

Because the question that then arises is “What else could they do?”

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A couple of months ago we observed that Jim Murphy’s sparsely-attended tour of 100 Scottish street corners appeared to be mostly populated by Labour politicians and activists following him around multiple locations to pad out the, well, let’s call them “crowds”. It’s interesting to note that he now seems to have abandoned any pretence.

And it makes the point of the exercise a little hard to discern.

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This is Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Eddie Bone of the Campaign for an English Parliament in a remarkable nine minutes of “Good Morning Scotland” this morning.

It’s the nearest to sounding like a Yes voter you’ll ever hear James Naughtie. Enjoy.

One of the most commonly-observed facets of the independence referendum so far has been the lack of a real grassroots “Better Together” campaign, and as a historian of Scottish popular politics I’ve found myself pondering why there wasn’t one.

It’s not like there aren’t thousands of Scots who passionately believe in the Union and will be voting No, and are perfectly capable of arguing their case. We all know some – I certainly do, both family and friends. But there’s no organised grassroots campaigning of any serious note. Tiny handfuls of Labour activists, some of them shipped up from England and paid, have done almost all of the donkey work so far.

But as a historian of Scottish popular politics I should have an explanation, shouldn’t I? And when I had a think about it, something occurred to me.

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Here’s “Better Together” chief Blair McDougall in today’s Herald:

“Launching the [#PatronisingBTLady] video yesterday, Better Together campaign director Blair McDougall said: ‘The key factor for people isn’t the love of our country – as both Yes and No voters love Scotland. The key factor is the love of our families.’“

Let’s just read that through again. He’s saying that his campaign can’t use “love of our country” as a campaign weapon because people on both sides love their country. So instead he’s going to use “love of our families” as a distinguishing characteristic.

The only possible conclusion that can be drawn from those statements is that Yes supporters don’t love their families. It’s a bold gambit, we’ll give him that.

Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.

We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.

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The website of the Dumfries & Galloway Conservative Party yesterday:

Perhaps they read the press coverage of the Salmond-Darling debate later on.

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The key exchange on currency from last night’s debate:

At the end of the clip, a flustered Darling finally blurts out what the No camp have been trying not to admit for the entire campaign: “Of course we could use the pound”.

Unionists and journalists are now frantically spinning that they’d never denied such a thing. But we know that’s not true, and nobody got left with more egg on their face than Mr Darling’s supposed superior, Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont.

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Things you’ll never hear a Scottish interviewer say.