Wings Over Scotland

It’s a Bank Holiday and frankly there’s absolutely bugger-all of any interest in the news today, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. I’ve only used the personal pronoun for a couple of Wings articles out of over 2,300 in the site’s two and a half years of existence, because the independence debate isn’t about me. But a curious piece in today’s Herald by David Torrance merits such a response.

If you don’t see what it’s got to do with that video*, bear with me.

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To cheer you up a bit, we thought you might like to see a couple of rather curious pieces from this weekend’s right-wing press. 300 years of the Union have infamously left Scotland with the lowest life expectancies in the UK, as illustrated in particularly stark fashion by some maps published a couple of years ago in the Guardian:

But what can be done about it?

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Respectable author Allan Massie (father of Spectator columnist Alex) rather shames himself in today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday, with a particularly grim piece of what we assume is supposed to be comical crystal ball-gazing, painting a melodramatic picture of an apocalyptic post-independence Scotland as seen by Project Fear.

Over 2500 words long, it ticks all the boxes – no currency union, a mass exodus of business, Spain vetoing Scotland’s EU membership, economic Armageddon forcing the return of tuition fees and prescription charges, Trident staying on the Clyde permanently, Orkney and Shetland voting to stay with the UK and somehow taking the oil with them in direct contravention of all international law, and so on.

Which would all be a super piece of knockabout fun, were it not for the fact that we’ve already almost lost count of the number of times the right-wing English media, and in particular the Mail itself, has already trotted out this same dystopian drivel.

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Despite the strikingly unequivocal nature of David Trimble’s clarification yesterday of his comments about the independence referendum’s potential impact on Northern Irish politics, remarkably the media are today still trying to spin them into a dire warning about a Yes vote causing renewed violence in the province.

The picture below is a page from this morning’s Sunday Times.

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We’ve quite frequently highlighted the ugly, irresponsible tone of the No campaign’s – and especially Labour’s – comments about “foreigners” in the independence debate. And the reason we do is because that sort of language feeds attitudes like these.

There is, sadly, more where that came from.

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As people who commission opinion polls occasionally, a thing that puzzles us is why other people who do it ask questions and then don’t talk about the results.

Some polls are done with the intention of being for private consumption only (this is particularly true when they’re commissioned by one side or the other in a debate, rather than by a notionally-impartial newspaper or the pollster themselves), and at other times results will be kept private because the results are unfavourable to the people who commissioned them.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we’ve never withheld any results for that reason.)

But at other times, results will be published but never discussed. Which is why, whenever a poll’s just come out these days, we get ourselves straight over to the polling company’s website and see what’s been left out.

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David Cameron, Prime Minister’s Questions, 30 April 2014:

“I think that what Alex Salmond said [about Vladimir Putin] was a major error of judgment and that all of us in this House should be supporting the Ukrainian desire to be a sovereign, independent country and to have the respect of the international community and party leaders for that ambition.”

(Our emphasis.) It’s not only us finding that just the tiniest bit hypocritical, is it?

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STV Sport has tonight broken the news that Scotland will play England in a friendly international at Hampden on November 18 this year.

Would you like to imagine, readers, the songs the visiting England support might sing if Scotland had voted to continue being ruled by them exactly two months earlier?

If you feel your strength sapping between now and September, remember that.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Yes Glasgow has been inviting No speakers to take part in this Thursday’s event for literally months. They’ve contacted every single MP and MSP from a Unionist party representing a Glasgow seat, asking them to participate. They offered from the very beginning to let “Better Together” co-organise and co-host the debate, which will be chaired by the neutral Electoral Reform Society Scotland.

The only reason that “everyone on the platform is a Yes supporter” is because nobody from the No side is prepared to face the Glasgow public and put their case. The opportunity is still there. We confess ourselves perplexed that they seem determined to refuse it, and then to complain bitterly that the debate is one-sided.

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I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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Alert readers will be familiar with a phenomenon we often like to highlight in these pages – that of the dramatic newspaper headline which rapidly turns into something completely different by the time you read the text of the story.

There’s an especially fine example in today’s Telegraph.

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