Wings Over Scotland

As we noted last week, Eton- and Sandhurst-educated Sir Norman Arthur, figurehead of the No campaign’s latest high-powered grassroots fundraising drive, has a very impressive military record – Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, General Officer Commanding of the 3rd Armoured Division, General Officer Commanding of Scotland and mentioned in despatches during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

It’s just lucky the IRA didn’t have Twitter, or things might have been different.

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Here’s a “Better Together” spokesman on Alex Salmond’s New Statesman lecture:

“Alex Salmond seems to have ditched his plan to be best pals with the rest of the UK and has instead decided to tell the English, Welsh and Northern Irish people how rubbish they are.”

We were there. Want to know what he actually said about England?

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So we’re just letting this one slide, are we?

“[David Mundell], who next year will mark 10 years as the only Tory MP in Scotland, says, if there is a Yes vote, the First Minister’s declaration of Independence Day will have no legal status and be merely an aspiration.”

The Edinburgh Agreement seems increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.

Sounds like Hands Across The Border might be struggling for recruits.

So how long before participation becomes a mandatory part of the Work Programme?

Does any of this sound familiar, readers?

“Federalists [the opponents of Quebec independence] argued that the Yes campaign’s undertakings, such as those on using the Canadian dollar and joining international organisations, were, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on the agreement of the rest of Canada, on other countries or on international organisations.

The assertion that Canada would immediately assume the obligations and rights of all Canada’s treaties and conventions was particularly controversial. The US, Canada and Mexico all stated that Quebec should not assume that entry into NAFTA would be automatic.”

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When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):

“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”

The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.

So we can just forget about it, right?

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Prominent New Labour writer Dan Hodges has a piece in the Telegraph today (because where else would a New Labour commentator have a column?) about UKIP now being an openly racist party. It contains the following passage:

“Last May Farage visited Edinburgh, where he was met by a small but aggressive mob of protesters. Eventually he had to be escorted from the scene by police for his own safety.

Directly accusing the SNP of being behind the protest, Farage described the protesters as ‘racist Nazi scum’. The incident was, he said, ‘deeply racist and displayed a total hatred of the English’.

And he’s right. He wasn’t targeted on the basis of his race, but on the basis of his nationality. And as he said, that was racist.”

We’ll leave aside that the protest was nothing to do with the SNP or Scottish nationalists, that it was organised by a radical left-wing group and that one of the two men arrested in connection with the incident was in fact English himself. None of those factual inconveniences are allowed to get in the way of Hodges’ bigotry.

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If you missed it live, here’s the audio recording of the debate held at the Volunteer Rooms in Irvine on Friday. (The event wasn’t video-recorded, despite Clan Destiny Films having a high-quality camera team there, because the Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, Brian Donohoe, refused to give his permission.)

Click the image for the two-hour MP3 file.

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This week’s edition of the Sunday Herald is a “referendum special” marking 200 days of the campaign to go (although actually it doesn’t have an awful lot more referendum coverage than a normal issue).

There are lots of things worth reading – as ever, we recommend spending a modest 69p for a digital copy via PressDisplay – but what really caught our eye were the two interviews with the heads of the Yes and No camps, Blairs Jenkins and McDougall.

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This morning’s Scotland on Sunday:

Well, that seems clear.

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Will Self in the New Statesman, 28 February 2014:

“As someone who for the past two decades has visited Scotland at least three or four times a year, and spent a great deal of those visits in and around the former steel town of Motherwell, I cherish few illusions about the country.

On the whole, I’ve considered independence to be something of a no-brainer: if ever there was a small, potentially socialistic state that could do with being detached from its deluded imperialist neighbour, it’s Scotland.”

Despite our misgivings about the shortbread, bagpipes, sporrans, whisky, Nessie and deep-fried Mars bar cover, the magazine’s special “Scotland” issue isn’t bad at all. Of course, as Scots we’re all far too mean to pay £3.95 – £3.95! – for a copy, but do go and browse it on your local newsagent’s shelves.

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The diagram below comes from an interesting feature in The Chemical Engineer Today, pointed out to us by an alert reader and which has a few flaws but is still well worth a browse if you have (quite a lot of) time.

But the thing giving us a wee wry smile this morning is the realisation that if Tony Blair’s 1999  grab of 6000 square miles of Scottish sea is allowed to stand in post-Yes negotiations, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the “Clyde”, “Argyll” and “Fife” oilfields belong to the rUK, while “Britannia” belongs to Scotland.

Blair’s theft, aided and abetted by Donald Dewar and largely hushed-up by the media, is no laughing matter. But sometimes you just have to appreciate a nice bit of irony.