Wings Over Scotland

The New Statesman has been doggedly ignoring all our polite requests to release the audio of its controversial interview with Alistair Darling for several days now, but today it very quietly released the full text of it on its website.

Where previously it had reported the “Better Together” leader as having made an “inaudible mumble” in response to a question about whether the SNP were guilty of “blood-and-soil nationalism”, apparently the mag had given its ears a good swabbing out with a cotton-bud and concluded that it HAD been able to hear him after all.

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The Daily Record carries a story this evening about a man placing a £200,000 bet with William Hill on a No vote in the independence referendum.

“A punter is so sure of a No vote in the Independence referendum he has put a record £200,000 on the result.

The bet equalled the biggest sum wagered on politics in the UK. The revelation came yesterday from bookie William Hill, where the gambler made three hefty bets on the status quo being maintained.

The man, in his 50s, walked into a shop in Glasgow and put £30,000 on the counter, taking odds of 1/5 on a No vote. He then came back later that day and stuck on another £70,000.

And the next day he turned up with another £100,000 in cash, which he stuck on despite the odds shortening to 1/6. If Scots vote to stay in the Union he will win £36,000.”

And readers might be forgiven for finding it a bit familiar.

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This is what the media is asking you to swallow today, readers:

“If Scotland wants to be like the vast majority of NATO members and have no nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, NATO will cut off its own nose to spite its face and reject Scotland as a member, even though that would leave the strategically-crucial North Atlantic Gate (also known as the ‘GIUK Gap‘) guarded by a non-member state and one with basically no military at all.”

Right.

“Scientists who currently think Scottish universities and laboratories are the best place to research a cure for cancer will suddenly decide to use what they previously considered to be inferior facilities if Scots vote to take control of their own affairs, because as we all know, cancer-research scientists care more about Scottish politics than curing cancer.”

Uh-huh.

“Using the anniversary of D-Day as a tool to campaign for the Union, even though the men of countless independent nations besides the UK sacrificed their lives for freedom there, ISN’T a crass politicisation of the event.”

Sure. Of course.

We’ve said it before, readers, and with the heaviest of hearts we must presume that we’ll have to say it many more times in the next 100 days: they think you’re morons.

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“Great Britain” began with the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James the VI of Scotland ascended to the Throne of England and Ireland, but the “United Kingdom” didn’t come into existence until the Act of Union in 1707, which effectively dissolved the Scottish Parliament. The “British Empire” began with the Union with Scotland and, if those in support of a Yes vote have their way, it will end with Scottish independence.

But what’s any of that got to do with Barack Obama?

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This is a story in today’s Scottish Daily Express:

Now that’s what we call some rapid inflation.

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For the sake of our blood pressure we don’t normally tune in to Radio Scotland’s weekday phone-in show, but as Lallands Peat Worrier was on it today we stayed with it for a few minutes, and found ourselves getting increasingly annoyed as presenter Kaye Adams asked caller after caller if they thought Barack Obama’s comments on independence yesterday (in so far as he actually made any) had been “off the cuff”.

We knew they hadn’t been, so we rang up just to keep the record straight.

We wanted to have Obama’s awkward, halting delivery on file anyway, so this’ll do.

One of the most commonly-occurring arguments proffered by the left side of the No camp (regardless of how often it’s comprehensively debunked) is that should Scotland decide to leave the Union, it would condemn the English to perpetual Tory rule.

It’s essentially an appeal for Scotland to give up the chance of self-governance in order to mitigate someone else’s problem. But it could be even worse than that.

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There’s a considerable amount of uncertainty currently flying around on the internet with regards to Alistair Darling’s comments in an interview with the New Statesman which was published on the magazine’s website yesterday.

There seems to be no dispute that the “Better Together” leader compared Alex Salmond to dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, adding his name to the illustrious pantheon of assorted Unionist politicians and journalists who’ve likened Scotland’s democratically-elected First Minister to a series of genocidal murderers.

There is, however, something of a grey area around whether Mr Darling also accused the entire SNP of promoting “blood-and-soil nationalism” – an extremely offensive term normally used in reference to Nazi Germany, where it translated as “Blut und Boden”.

Well, let us clear that up for you. Yes, he did.

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We had an interesting chinwag with a very nice chap called David Phillips at the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier today. By the time he called we’d already managed to determine where the missing hundreds of millions had gotten to (a planned £400m cut to the Scottish defence budget from Westminster that oddly doesn’t get mentioned much when Unionists are telling us how we need to stay in the Union to protect defence jobs), but we did learn some other stuff.

Not unrelatedly, we thought it might be fun to list just a few of the factors in the IFS’s calculations of the finances of an independent Scotland that rely on being able to accurately predict the future – a skill at which governments and economists alike have, let’s say, a sub-optimal track record.

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After some nudging from us, YouGov have now slightly belatedly added the data tables and question text from their recent “Better Together”-commissioned poll on benefits and tax receipts to their website.

Strangely, none of the media reports of the poll mentioned the fact that in addition to quizzing Scots, the company asked the same set of questions* to full-sized samples of English and Welsh voters too. (Indeed, the samples for England and Wales were both bigger – 1051 Scots were polled, 1116 Welsh people and 1744 English.)

We don’t know why nobody cares about the opinion of the Northern Irish. But the data highlighted some interesting discrepancies, and one very surprising thing.

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This is Lord (Ian) Lang of Monkton (Conservative) speaking in the House Of Lords on the 6th of September 2011, during the second Lords reading of the Scotland Bill (later to become the Scotland Act 2012):

“Over the past decade, United Kingdom public spending, which determines the level of the Scottish block grant, has grown faster than Scottish income, which of course determines the revenue from income tax. UK public spending, of which Scotland has received its share and more, has grown by 94 per cent in 10 years, but Scottish income by only 48 per cent.

Therefore, when the new Scottish income tax replaces part of the block grant, it seems that it will have to be raised above the United Kingdom rate for Scottish public spending just to stand still.“

And there’s more.

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