Since we’re (reluctantly) talking about the odious and hateful side of the independence debate today, here’s crusading socialist MP and No campaigner George Galloway of the Respect party, retweeting a troll account depicting Chris and Colin Weir as a couple of fat pigs standing around in filth.
And on this occasion, the retweet IS an endorsement.
It’s been another one of those weekends when the independence debate has taken a bit of a nasty turn. Whether it’s the Sunday Times stirring up Anglo-Scottish tensions (deliberately or otherwise), the Daily Mail running supposedly comic articles that are just an orgy of Scottish self-loathing, or Tory councillors making menacing-sounding threats against us personally, it’s been a grim 48 hours for fans of civilised discourse.
And we can’t in all conscience say that much of it looks like an accident.
The tweet below was posted earlier this morning by Conservative councillor for East Renfrewshire Gordon McCaskill. We’ve asked him to clarify what it means, but at the time of writing no response has been forthcoming.
The comment was made in the context of the Sunday Herald reporting that Wings Over Scotland would be registering with the Electoral Commission as a “permitted participant” for the referendum campaign. Among other things, that will mean making our address public on the EC’s register and all campaign literature.
It’s somewhat disturbing that that fact has been the trigger for Cllr McCaskill issuing ominous-sounding warnings about being unable to “hide” from “sound and fury”.
Referendum polls now seem to be arriving on a daily basis, but this morning sees the appearance of two that offer some rather striking contrasts in more than one sense.
The less interesting, despite showing a remarkable swing of 5% to the No side, is an ICM one for Scotland on Sunday, which the paper gets predictably excited about and illustrates with an extreme close-up of a No activist with his face plastered in “Better Together” stickers (despite the man seeming to be in his 50s) and contorted into a provocative, mocking sneer.
The more unsettling one, however, is in the Sunday Times.
An alert reader directed us to this document this morning:
It’s a 2011 study by the non-political Glasgow Centre for Population Health, which attempts to discern why Scotland, and particularly Glasgow, has such appalling life expectancies compared to the rest of the UK. And its findings are startling.
The unionist case for Scots voting No in the independence referendum is encapsulated in the following quote from the website of “Better Together”, the official No campaign:
“Devolution offers us the best of both worlds: we have a strong Scottish Parliament taking important decisions about schools, hospitals and jobs AND we benefit from the strength, security and opportunities we can take advantage of being part of a bigger United Kingdom.”
The main problem with this argument is that there’s an alternative Union which would provide the Scottish Parliament with more powers to “take important decisions about” things and allow Scotland to “benefit from” and “take advantage of’” the “strength, security and opportunities” of being part of something far bigger than the UK itself.
We’ve been wiping tears of laughter from our eyes most of this morning, after reading one of the most magnificently bare-faced and audacious pieces of black-is-white lying we think we might ever have seen printed with a straight face in a British newspaper.
It appears in the Telegraph, which seems to have positioned itself latterly as the Daily Sport for people with a reading age above seven, and makes the mindboggling claim that “Contrary to its media image, the campaign to save the United Kingdom says it has more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents”.
In fairness, it doesn’t actually say whether these boots have any feet in them.
Monday:
(UK government “factsheet” issued by the Scotland Office.)
Wednesday:
“For the average mortgage in Scotland, there would be £5,400 more [in] mortgage payments a year.”
(George Osborne to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee.)
Yikes! What the hell happened on Tuesday?
We’re so used to reading doom-and-gloom predictions about the apocalyptic future that would await an independent Scotland, readers, that to our shame we occasionally fall foul of a trap we never stop warning you about – reading the headline of a story and not paying attention to the words below.
The one above is a case in point.
Mark Wallace in Conservative Home, 14 May 2014:
“Darling might not have been the most dynamic campaigner in the world, but at least he isn’t a complete and utter Jonah. Replacing him with Alexander is the equivalent of replacing your single-bar heater with a bonfire in your lounge because you weren’t warm enough, substituting your Morris Minor with a North Korean missile in the hope of getting to work faster or deciding to shave with a lawnmower because your disposable Bic was a bit blunt.“
Because it actually did make us laugh.
Well, that was odd. No sooner had we posted a rather lightweight little piece this morning, revealing that the fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” campaign had been in development since June 2012, than the story got a whole lot more interesting.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
