Wings Over Scotland

An alert and concerned reader living in the USA sent us a survey this week. It claimed to be from a charity called The Friends Of Scotland, which first rang a bell with us in relation to a very popular article we ran about six weeks ago, and which referred to a committee in the US Senate called the Friends Of Scotland Caucus.

However, it turned out to be nothing to do with them. The Friends Of Scotland charity was actually the organisation which brought us Jack McConnell in a pinstripe kilt a few years back, and – some might say deservingly, if for that reason alone – it went bust last October. Its website is now vacant, and the most recent archived version of it that actually had any content dates back to September 2012.

We’ve as yet found no reference anywhere to the organisation being revived, so we’ll have to treat their credentials as suspect, but that’s not particularly relevant to us. Of more interest is that the questionnaire says the results of the poll will be forwarded to the Scottish media, and we thought you might want a little heads-up on its nature, just in case any of them decide to run with it.

We think it’s fair to say some of the questions may be very slightly biased.

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The Daily Record has a new poll from Survation today, with the same razor’s-edge findings as their last one. With don’t-knows excluded, the vote is poised at 47 Yes 53 No, which is statistically a dead heat (as polls of this size have a 3% margin of error).

The paper oddly chooses to lead not on the headline figure but on a finding which shows one in five Scots have had an argument with a friend or family member over independence, which seems a remarkably low figure to us in the circumstances. But the thing that made us smile was the analysis of the poll by Scotland’s Only Living Psephologist, the esteemed Professor John Curtice.

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From last night’s Question Time. We don’t think it’s funny.

We think it sums up the respective campaigns pretty well, in truth.

Only our very alertest readers are likely to recall our first brush with Azeem Ibrahim of the “Scotland Institute”, a right-wing think tank which recently came up with a report on an independent Scotland’s debt that was picked up by some of the less discerning newspapers but which we ignored for being too boring.

And we must concede fair play to the eternally attention-seeking Mr Ibrahim, because he’s come storming right back with something altogether livelier.

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Kudos is due to the Daily Record today, which has a large and prominent feature about NHS surgeon Dr Philippa Whitford, with whom readers should be familiar. Her message, from a position of knowledge and authority, of the fate awaiting the NHS on both sides of the border is a powerful one and makes a strong case for a Yes vote.

Obviously, that upsets both Labour and the No campaign very much.

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They say that men think about sex every six seconds. Apparently Jenny Marra thinks about Alex Salmond every 12, as she manages to get his name into this 48-second clip from last night’s BBC Scotland debate no fewer than four times, though the question was about reducing poverty by saving money on aircraft carriers and Trident.

We still don’t really understand why Labour think focusing their entire political strategy on personally attacking the most popular politician in the country is a smart ploy, but far be it from us to tell them their job when it’s been such a success for them so far.

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Last month we carried a view of the Scottish independence debate from the Canadian province of Quebec. Today we hear from the English-speaking side of the country.

In English-speaking Canada, few people seem to be aware of Scotland’s independence referendum. It doesn’t register much in the papers, much less our cheerfully oblivious TV news. The couple of friends I’ve told about it were interested, but mainly viewed the event as they would the World Cup: a distant, if intriguing, foreign phenomenon.

Conversely, Scotland’s view of Canada has been quite the opposite. Commentators on both the Yes and No sides have drawn explicit parallels with the Canadian experience, especially Quebec’s fraught history of referenda and sovereignty debate.

As a Canadian-American who’s spent a good deal of time south of the border, however, I think there’s a much more apt comparison to be made.

Canada’s bizarre love-hate relationship with our dysfunctional, arrogant, yet somehow still likeable neighbours and friends in the United States of America is both cautionary and optimistic. And it indicates the absolute need for a Yes vote.

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The Electoral Commission has this afternoon released the first of four sets of data about cash contributions and loans to referendum campaigning organisations, this one comprising information about donations over £7,500.

Having complained bitterly just a couple of months ago about being the “underdog” because “the Yes camp have more financial firepower”, Blair McDougall’s “Better Together” has trousered over £2.4m from rich business donors, whereas Yes Scotland has collected under £1.2m, almost all of it from lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

Those making gifts to various arms of the No campaign include the mysterious Rain Dance Investments (£200,000) – a company with no website, which appears to be based in an eight-bedroomed house in a small village in Lincoln which also seems to be home to numerous other companies.

Our favourites, though, without question, are the Stalbury Trustees.

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Andrew Nicoll in the Scottish Sun, 7 July 2014:

“The summer break means there are now only nine sitting days of the Scottish Parliament left before the big independence vote.

It also means I’ve more time on my hands to catch up with stuff, like a fascinating report from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre looking at how Scotland has changed since we first hosted the Commonwealth Games, back in 1970.

Take shipbuilding, for example. There are endless dire warnings that shipbuilding will be killed off by independence. All I can say is that, reading this report, the UK has already had a damned good try.

In 1970 Scotland’s shipbuilding industry employed 34,000 people, with 10,000 jobs in Glasgow alone. When the Games returned to Edinburgh in 1986, we had 25,000 shipbuilders and now there are just 6,000, half of them in Glasgow.

That doesn’t sound to me like a recipe for success.”

Our emphasis. The full report can be read here.

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To be honest, readers, when we’re busy, which is always, we have a tendency to stop reading newspaper stories by the time they get to the quote from a “Better Together” or UK government spokesman. It’s not exactly tricky to predict what they’re going to say, and in the case of the former it’ll usually be some boorish, juvenile sneer that just makes us depressed.

But last night we happened to get all the way to the end of a Scotsman article (we were surprised too), and noticed something that was a more blatant lie than usual.

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Channel 4 has now aired its Dispatches programme about “intimidation”, in which a lot of grown adults from the cut-throat world of business whined about possible vague hints they may or may not have picked up that the Scottish Government would rather they kept quiet about independence.

The estimable Lallands Peat Worrier skewers the subject brilliantly here, so we shan’t detain ourselves further with the specifics – other than to passingly note that as Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine tweeted during the show, one of the alleged victims was so frightened and cowed into submission that he’s currently suing the Scottish Government at the European Court about something else entirely.

But there was something else that had us puzzled.

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Earlier today we referred to a story from the Sunday Times, picked up by some of the tabloids this morning, about how Scotland manager Jock Stein tried to cancel a World Cup scouting trip to New Zealand in 1982 in a panic because he feared that Margaret Thatcher was about to start a nuclear war over the Falklands.

It seems remiss not to note a chilling passage from the original ST piece.

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