Wings Over Scotland

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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Alert readers will be aware that this site spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out how few and how trivial are the actual political differences between the three UK parties. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all basically offer slightly tweaked and rebadged versions of the same centre-right policies, in an unhealthy consensus set in concrete by the UK’s undemocratic electoral system.

There does, however, remain one major issue on which there’s still clear blue water between the only two parties who might provide the next UK Prime Minister, and it’s one that’s a lot more important to the independence debate than is generally thought. Have you guessed what it is yet?

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The transcript below is taken from a public meeting hosted by the Scottish Office at Murrayfield in Edinburgh last Thursday (24 April), featuring Alistair Carmichael.

You can listen for yourself by clicking the above image.

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Anyone involved in the independence debate for any length of time will probably already have lost count of how many times they’ve heard the plaintive we-cannae-dae-it wail of “But how will you pay for all of Alex Salmond’s milk and honey promises?”

So here’s a clue.

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We absolutely love the fact that only one of the stories in the “Referendum News” section of the Herald website this morning is headlined in all capitals:

It paints a rather lovely picture of everyone at the “Better Together” HQ running around shouting “THERE IS NO PANIC! EVERYONE HERE IS TOTALLY CALM!” at the tops of their voices to anyone in the general vicinity.

But there’s something less amusing about the very short piece.

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The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.

Because those are flying about all over the place.

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We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.

But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.

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We suppose we have to credit “Better Together” with SOME intelligence after all. It seems they’ve finally and belatedly learned that Tory ministers coming up and lecturing Scotland is a counter-productive business, so this week they sent Gordon Brown in to do Iain Duncan Smith’s dirty work for him, by issuing dire warnings about the cost of welfare in an independent Scotland using figures helpfully fed to him by IDS’s Department for Work and Pensions.

But the UK government also released, with rather less fanfare, some other figures about pensions this week that didn’t reflect quite as well on the Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister.

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