Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scottish playwright Peter Arnott on his blog last month:

“The very core of the fear in ‘Project Fear’ is fear of English vengeance.  All the stuff about trade barriers and borders and passports and no one ever buying whisky again are predicated on the same thing: on the apparently inevitable consequence that they will hurt us if we dare.  

This expectation which informs all the dire prognostications of economic boycotts and general administrative bloody mindedness, even of proper fisticuffs over the assets – is based on an image of the English as petty, spiteful, nasty and vengeful.

The No campaign seem certain that the majority stakeholders in the ‘greatest multinational family’ in history will react like vindictive children.”

Cheers to Wings contributor Simon Varwell for the tip-off.

The thinktank Reform Scotland is no mouthpiece for the Yes campaign. Wikipedia notes that it’s “a sister organisation to the London-based right-wing, free market think tank Reform”, and in fact it’s closely involved with the forgotten “Devo Plus” campaign group created by politicians from the Unionist parties. Devo Plus itself is endorsed by “Better Together”, to the extent that BT celebrated DP’s birthday last year.

So we were pretty interested when Reform Scotland board member Professor Sir Donald Mackay appeared in today’s Sunday Times rubbishing the UK government’s pessimistic projections for an independent Scotland’s oil revenues, and suggesting that in fact a more realistic figure was more than TWICE the one being claimed by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Read the rest of this entry →

There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.

For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.

Read the rest of this entry →

In today’s Scottish Sun:

There’s nothing worse for a parent than your children seeing people as foreigners. We’re sure that Ed’s Belgian father and Polish mother would agree.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s a curious piece in today’s Guardian about the Scotstoun area of Glasgow, home to the shipbuilding yard of BAE Systems. It typifies what’s perhaps the most successful and consistent strategy that the No campaign has managed to deploy in the entire independence debate. Let’s listen in.

Read the rest of this entry →

Louise Morton is the Vice Chair of Moray Labour Party. She’s already familiar to some of our more veteran and alert readers for laughing when Yes activists were intimidated out of campaigning at a local fair with threats of violence.

Less than two days after Labour’s hapless candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus resigned for likening some children at a peaceful protest to the Hitler Youth, Ms Morton – whose son Sean is the party’s 2015 candidate for the Moray seat – thought it’d be a wizard jape to tweet this:

It’s like a disease, readers. They can’t keep a lid on their hatred to save their lives.

Jill Stephenson is (or maybe was) Professor Emerita of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh. She was the subject of a substantial profile piece in the Times a couple of months ago on the subject of the independence campaign, which called her “one of the most compelling voices in support of the Union” (as well as somewhat inflating her status to just “Professor Emerita of History”), and therefore we must take her to be a respectable commentator who wouldn’t tell crude flat-out lies.

So we were intrigued to notice the above tweet from yesterday. Can anyone point us to Professor Curtice actually making such a claim? It would surely be significant if the country’s leading (and apparently only) psephologist had indeed said that Yes voters were just a bunch of thickos. At the very least it would somewhat colour his analysis, which we’ve hitherto always considered professional and impartial.

We’ve got to pop out for a bit, so any help would be appreciated.

Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)

The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Guardian has a story today about what Herald journalist Paul Hutcheon pithily described yesterday as Jim Murphy MP’s “100 day tour of Scottish Labour activists”, which we’ve previously featured on this site.

But we were contacted by an alert reader who made a point echoed by one of the replies to Hutcheon’s tweet – doesn’t Mr Murphy already have a full-time job?

Read the rest of this entry →