Why would an Englishman vote for Scottish independence? Why would a whole group of English people vote Yes? It’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and which the group I helped to co-found last week, “English Scots for Yes”, intends to answer.
I’m Will McLeod and I’m the Government and World Affairs Correspondent for Netroots Radio in Washington, DC. I’ve been following the Scottish independence referendum for a few years now. Most of the fallacious arguments I’ve seen have been pretty well knocked down, but there’s one in particular that keeps cropping up which is absolutely ridiculous and needs to be dealt with.
I also do policy work for various people, and since no other foreign policy and government policy geeks have knocked down the NATO argument and the defense spending argument, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring.
Alert readers may have spotted that the “Vote No Borders” cinema advert featured on this much-viewed Wings article from a few days ago can no longer be played from the campaign group’s YouTube page, returning a “Private” error.
An even more alert reader, however, had already made a copy.
And while the entire series of ads has now been effectively banned by all of Scotland’s cinema chains, all the other ones are still present on the website while the NHS one (described as “a light-hearted sketch”) has vanished. And now we’ve found out why.
Here’s an important statistic: almost 40% of people who look at an online article don’t get beyond the headline and strapline. More and more readers fall away the further down the article you get – by the time you’re just a few hundred words in, you’ve probably lost roughly 70% of people who started reading.
So we’re going to try to keep this really short.
Here’s the beleaguered Danny Alexander, quoted by the Guardian today (11.27am):
Well, that’s a relief.
It’s not often that you see the same story on the front page of the i and the Financial Times. It’s even rarer – in fact, perhaps unprecedented – if that story’s about Scotland, because the otherwise-admirable mini-tabloid is barely even aware that there’s a part of the UK north of Newcastle.
(Its parent paper, the Independent, is we think unique among national UK newspapers in not even having a Scotland section, let alone a Scottish edition.)
So when it happens, you know it must be a pretty darned significant story – one which the Scottish press will be all over like a swarm of wasps at a jam-factory picnic. Right?
We’re rather kicking ourselves for not having spotted this one when it was staring us in the face, so kudos to Welsh professor of political science Roger Scully for the catch.
In the 2009 European elections, UKIP got 16.5% of the vote in the UK as a whole, and 5.2% in Scotland – a gap of 11.3%. In this year’s election the tallies were 27.5% in the UK and 10.5% in Scotland – a gap of 17%.
In other words, despite all the bluster from Unionists about how Scotland can no longer claim to be different to the rest of the UK in terms of supporting Nigel Farage’s party, in fact the degree of difference has substantially increased, by a whopping 55%.
It just seems worth pointing out.
According to Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine, this afternoon Johann Lamont issued a press release bizarrely calling on all supporters of “progressive” politics to unite against the SNP and UKIP. Now, that’s fairly mindboggling in itself in all sorts of ways, but we can’t help wondering whether she ran it past her deputy first.
Because that tweet raises a whole host of questions.
Some considered thoughts on the evening’s events, then.
Yeah, nice work, Britain.
Multiple journalists are now reporting that no matter what the result of the Western Isles count tomorrow, UKIP have pipped the SNP, by a narrow margin, to Scotland’s sixth European Parliament seat.
Scots, you just let David Coburn speak for you on an international stage. Well done.
A thing we’ve noticed throughout the referendum campaign is just how delicate many of those on the No side are when faced with any sort of unfavourable information. Having perhaps expected a very easy ride, a lot of Unionists (and indeed several journalists) have proven terribly thin-skinned, with a tendency to fly off the handle at comically slight amounts of challenge.
The Secretary of State for Portsmouth, for example, having been introduced into the debate as a “bruiser”, hadn’t been in his post five minutes before he was bawling to STV’s Rona McDougall for protection as the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon hammered him with nothing more than a few facts and arguments.
When placed under even the tiniest modicum of pressure, No-camp figures will panic and start blurting out the most ludicrous claims, like Ian Davidson’s extraordinary, petulant “Newsnat Scotland” outburst at a justifiably offended Isabel Fraser, or Alistair Darling’s mad assertion that North Sea oil was on course to run out in January 2017.
And so it was this week with Tory MSP Murdo Fraser.
While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.
We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.
But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
