Wings Over Scotland

This is the Guardian’s elaborate, deliberately-absurd April Fool story:

Ha ha! Good one!

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David Mitchell in the Guardian, 30 March 2014:

“There’s always a chance that people will decide who to vote for according to policy – and by ‘people’, I mean the people that matter: the indecisive minority who change which party they vote for from election to election according to whim, and consequently determine every result.

But it doesn’t seem likely to me that policy is what’s going to swing the swingers this time – although I may only think that because the Labour Party’s policies are still largely secret.”

People only vote for change if they think there’ll actually be some.

From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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A new poll by Populus for the Daily Politics is out today, with some interesting rankings for the four UK party leaders. (Which in a UK context includes Nigel Farage, despite his representing a party without a single MP while there are seven other parties at Westminster who do have seats.)

As you can see, UK respondents were asked to identify the three main qualities they associated with each leader, from a list of positive and negative ones. It’s fair to say none comes out covered in glory – fewer than one in five people think the UK’s Prime Minister is “competent”, for example. But the balance is striking.

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Supporters of independence are enjoying an unusual feeling this morning – enjoying an issue of the Daily Mail. A screaming front-page headline warns of a “CRISIS” in the No campaign, and a double-page spread inside lays into “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling, while Professor John Curtice lambasts the work of the ex-Chancellor and his team of “Abominable No Men” to date, noting that:

“To be effective, a campaign message needs three qualities. It needs to tell voters something new about a subject that matters to them, it has to be delivered by a credible source and it should not be widely disputed. The No side’s messages have fallen flat on all three grounds.

The No side often gives the impression constant criticism of independence will win the day. Maybe it is time for it to think again.”

And in fairness, the Unionist camp has reacted positively.

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Sorry we’ve been a bit post-light today, readers. The phone’s barely stopped ringing, and when it did it was only for long enough to scratch the surface of an avalanche of tweets and emails, all concerning this week’s zany goings-on with the Glasgow Subway. Suffice it to say that you haven’t heard half of what’s transpired yet, but we hope to bring you the full story pretty soon.

For now, for anyone who missed them, STV, BBC and the Guardian.

So, who wants to play a wee fun quiz game over how many responses we’ve had from the members of Labour’s Devolution Commission to our polite request for clarification of some issues regarding their post-No taxation policy?

(a) None, still not even a single form acknowledgement of our email?

(b) Oh, you got it already.

It’s almost as if they wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, isn’t it?

The advert below is being distributed by Glasgow Subway to its passengers today.

But that’s okay, because it’s not “political”.

We think we might have just worked out why Scottish newspaper sales are in irreversible decline, readers. It’s because if you buy the papers for about two weeks you can just keep them in a drawer, bring them out a few weeks later and read all the same stories again without having to pay for them twice.

Because in the Scottish media, every day is Groundhog Day.

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Still not a single email, nor even a simple acknowledgement, in response to our list of polite, factual questions about Labour’s proposals for “enhanced” devolution. We also tweeted every member of the Devolution Commission with a Twitter account yesterday to ask if they’d be replying, and haven’t had a response from any of them.

Tune in tomorrow for the latest developments!

There’s an interesting survey over on the Herald at the moment. Self-selecting and therefore non-scientific, it’s nevertheless quite intriguing, with (the paper notes) strong support for the Scottish Government’s positions on childcare, Trident, renationalising the Royal Mail and encouraging more flights from Scottish airports, but opposition to its plans to cut Corporation Tax.

A couple of the other results, though, are reported a bit more oddly.

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