Wings Over Scotland

The estimable James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop! wrote an excellent blog post the other day deconstructing a laughably skewed and leading poll which was commissioned by “Better Together” this month.

Blair McDougall’s Beleaguered Billy Boys, as hardly anyone calls them, had loudly and bizarrely trumpeted figures which actually showed a 6% swing to Yes, but that wasn’t the thing we found most interesting in their press release.

“In what is another blow to the SNP, just 35% of those questioned by YouGov on behalf of Better Together backed separation over a stronger Scottish Parliament within the UK.”

The poll question had in fact offered respondents a forced choice between two options: independence or “Scotland remaining part of the UK with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament”. (Which meant, among many other quirks which made the findings nonsensical, that the roughly 10% of people who want Holyrood abolished altogether got lumped in with the “increased powers” side as the least-worst option.)

We’ve already learned what BT mean by “increased powers” – the piddly and trivial ones enshrined by the Scotland Act 2012, rather than any dramatic new settlement from any of the Unionist parties, but the jarring part of the release is the twisting of that already-twisted wording to mean “stronger”.

Because a stronger Scottish Parliament is the LAST thing the No parties want, and you only have to spend a minute thinking about it to figure out why.

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This is the new “positive” campaign poster from “Better Together”:

There’s a lie in the picture, but it’s probably not the one you think.

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The Scottish media displays such a remarkable uniformity of thought when it comes to the independence debate that you’d think it’d be the easiest thing in the world for them to at least all get their story straight when they launch a smear campaign against a prominent Yes figure.

That, however, would presuppose that they weren’t also incompetent.

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We were going to take the night off until we read this drivel. Gah.

And if we’re being honest, we were just too pleased with the pun.

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“Sod it”, we thought, “let’s compile a list after all“.

Clearly we’re not impartial judges of how the No campaign is being conducted. To assess its performance with any degree of fairness, we must instead take the widest possible sample of opinion from those on its own side. Here goes, then.

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Remember, readers, how last year “Better Together” tried to ridicule the fact that we’d put a satirical line about “space monsters” into one of the questions in our first Panelbase poll? Remember how it was the most absurd, stupid thing imaginable?

That was the UK Secretary of State for Defence, yesterday.

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We honestly don’t understand how anyone with electricity in their house or a newsagent anywhere within a 30-mile radius can possibly come to say things like this:

“[Independence] is a view not shared by IT teacher Elaine Coates, originally from Glasgow but now in Tettenhall. The mother of three has lived in England for 30 years but has no strong views on independence.

‘I just don’t see how it will work, I think Scotland would be crazy to do this,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t have any oil so how is it going to get its income? Whisky and tourism, probably, but that’s it.'”

Firstly, Elaine, we’d have to say that “it would be crazy” DOES actually sound like quite a strong view on independence to us. But in all seriousness, leaving all snark and sarcasm aside, how on Earth does a human being living in the UK in 2014, seemingly not inside any sort of secure institution, come to believe something like that?

Ms Coates isn’t some lone madwoman. Other people, also not resident in mental hospitals, say the same thing. And we get that lots of people aren’t into politics. But when it comes to ignorance about your own nation, being unaware that Scotland has oil is somewhere on a par with not knowing that Great Britain is an island. How in the world do you go through decades of adult life without ever picking up on that fact?

It’s not a rhetorical question. Can someone actually explain it to us?

We’ve just been watching the latest of the BBC’s big independence referendum debates, and we’d like the hour of our life we wasted back, please.

It wasn’t as though it was the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. It was, if nothing else, relatively even-tempered, helped by some firm moderation by James Cook. Lesley Riddoch was as reliable, sensible and on top of the facts as she always is (although even we’re starting to get fed up of hearing her go on about Norway all the time). And while Brian Wilson is a dishonest and bilious wee nyaff, he does have the one huge saving grace that he isn’t Anas Sarwar.

But tell us this, readers – what was the point of it all?

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Matthew Norman in the Independent, 15 April 2014:

“In the entire global history of the political campaign, has any been more misconceived, wretchedly executed and potentially self-defeating than the one designed to keep Scotland within the United Kingdom?

Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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One of the great things about this site’s sky-high viewing figures is that on the rare occasions when we might be, for example, out having a walk in the park to get over the crushing disappointment of somehow losing yet another Scottish Cup semi-final, our ever-vigilant readers will remain alert.

Otherwise, we might have missed this.

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Even Sparta’s mythical iron-bar currency – specifically designed, so legend had it, to shackle the economy by being too heavy to buy or trade anything – was marginally better, in Alistair Darling’s view, than anything an independent Scotland might be able to use for money, all of which will lead to inevitable doom.

Because Scotland, as all good unionists know, is the only country in world history for which there is no currency option that will work at all.

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