Wings Over Scotland

The above is a deceptively simple question and one to which the answer, of course, is as varied as the people you might ask it of as we approach September’s vote.

The debate so far would suggest that at one end of the scale, we’re a nation of poor wee souls, much safer shackled to a United Kingdom that gifts us stability and security in the face of choppy global waters and saves us from the hassle of making crucial political decisions for ourselves. At the other end, we’re a proud nation of untold prosperity, a nirvana of wealth and social justice primed to emerge after our divorce from our oppressors in Westminster.

For anyone in between and still grappling with their identity, the Economist helpfully informed us recently that being Scottish means painting a Saltire on your face, wearing a Jimmy hat and shouting at nothing in particular. Glad that’s sorted then.

The truth is that very few of us will see ourselves in these broad-brushed caricatures of Scottish identity. I certainly don’t. In fact, the more I force myself to think about it, the clearer it becomes that I don’t have a bloody clue what it means to be Scottish.

Or at least I didn’t until last month.

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The UK government is about to put another taxpayer-funded leaflet through every door in Scotland, laden with dire warnings about the consequences of independence.

Boiled down to just five bullet points – one of which is the meaningless “best of both worlds” – it presents the case for the UK as amounting to keeping the pound (which Scotland can do either way), higher public spending (omitting the fact that Scots pay over the odds for said spending), jobs with UK companies (which would be unaffected because EU law demands freedom of employment) and lower energy bills.

The latter is based on the oft-repeated claim that fuel bills would rise in Scotland because the rUK would no longer pay to import subsidised Scottish renewable energy. But an article in The Ecologist this week, by two respected academics from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, blows that argument out of the water.

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From this interesting documentary last month on Al Jazeera.

This is how they think they’ll win. 49 days left to prove them wrong.

The referendum is NEXT MONTH, everyone. NEXT MONTH.

We’re big fans of Kevin Bridges. Not only is he one of the finest comedians Scotland has produced in many years, it turns out the Glasgow comic is also a top fella. On seeing a tweet last month from the Maryhill food bank showing some perilously empty shelves, Kevin got straight in touch, asked how much money it would need to fill them and turned up with Tesco vouchers for the whole £1000.

We salute him wholeheartedly, and it was right and proper that the story was widely covered in the press, with the Scottish Sun (pictured above), Daily Record and STV News all reporting the generous gesture, and all of them also mentioning that Celtic star Kris Commons’ wife Lisa Hague had made much-needed contributions too.

There was something missing, though.

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This man is still regularly invited on TV by both the BBC and STV as a serious pundit.

Were anyone to still be unsure of the fact that different rules of behaviour apply to Unionists and Yes supporters, we invite them to consider the evidence.

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This is Andy Burnham, Labour’s shadow health secretary, earlier this week:

“‘Commissioners have been ordered to put all services out to the market, NHS spending on private and other providers has gone through the £10bn barrier for the first time.

When did the British public ever give their consent for this? It is indefensible for the character of the country’s most valued institution to be changed in this way without the public being given a say.’

Mr Burnham has written to the boss of NHS England, Simon Stevens, to call for a pause in privatisation unless patient safety or service is at risk.”

And here’s a press release from the Unite trade union in 2009, when Labour were in power and Mr Burnham actually was the Health Secretary:

“‘Roll back the privatisation of the NHS, Andy’

Unite presented a letter signed by 3,000 NHS members to the Department of Health today (Wednesday, 26 August), calling on health secretary Andy Burnham to halt the privatisation of the health service.

The [letter] was part of Unite’s Health B4 Profit campaign designed to preserve the NHS as ‘a publicly owned, publicly accountable, universal and comprehensive health service managed and run for the public good’.

Unite said that an estimated £20 billion would be spent on creating the bureaucratic market infrastructure for privatisation – money that could be better spent on frontline services.

Karen Reay said: ‘Today, we are asking Andy Burnham to protect the heart and soul of the NHS in England and roll back these costly and dangerous plans.

‘The continuing vicious attacks by vested interests on President Obama over his plans to provide healthcare for the estimated 47 million Americans currently without this safety net is a stark warning of what awaits British citizens, if the mercenary forces of privatisation are allowed to triumph.'”

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We can only assume the No campaign and media are in a growing panic about the imminent TV showdown between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling or something. Even by the high previous standards of insanity from the UK side of the referendum debate, this week has seen something of a disintegration in sanity.

Apart from the usual flood of mad scare stories, we’ve had papers like the Scotsman, Daily Record and Press & Journal promoting a ludicrous poll of a couple of hundred hand-picked expats. We’ve had the Guardian’s Martin Kettle competing with the Mail’s Simon Heffer for the most embarrassingly moronic vision of a post-independence future yet committed to print. (This time, a Yes vote sparks a new civil war in Ireland.)

And then there’s this:

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We did tell you this was coming:

The poll in question can actually be found on Daily Record sister site Scotland Now, so we’re not entirely sure why the Scotsman is plugging it for them. But if you’d like to see the hilariously loaded and leading questions that delivered the result in question, just pop back to this Wings Over Scotland piece from about three weeks ago.

To be honest, in the circumstances we’re amazed it was as low as 74%.

Readers have had a small handful of replies in response to our “Infrequently Asked Questions” post of last week. (Have you written to your MP/MSP yet? WHY NOT?)

They’ve mostly been pretty rubbish, as you’d probably expect. But while pondering them, a thought suddenly came to us out of the blue, in that irritating “Why on Earth didn’t I spot this before?” way that’s the curse of all writers.

It’s about the idea that the rUK would have to impose border controls – logically, including a 100-mile-long physical barrier from Gretna to Berwick patrolled 24/7 by armed guards – if an independent Scotland adopted a significantly different immigration policy to that of the remnant UK.

The notion has always been cobblers, for all sorts of reasons including the ludicrous cost such an undertaking would entail and how upset poor Rory Stewart would be, but if you think about it there’s an even more obvious one.

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Alert readers will of course remember a few short weeks ago in April, when “Better Together” attracted much great hoopla in the press for its relaunched, “more positive” campaign strategy which would dazzle Scots with the feelgood benefits of the Union.

We thought it’d be worth checking in and seeing how that was going.

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The UK Trident programme encompasses the development, procurement and operation of the current generation of British nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them. It was announced in July 1980 and patrols began in December 1994. Its stated purpose is to provide “the minimum effective nuclear deterrent as the ultimate means to deter the most extreme threat”.

It has also been described by former Vulcan squadron commander (the UK’s original nuclear deterrent) and current vice-president of CND, Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, as Britain’s “stick-on hairy chest”.

And yet other than “We should/shouldn’t get rid of it”, it’s rarely the subject of any serious debate or investigation. And as it’s the summer close season for politics, this seemed like a good time.

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