Wings Over Scotland

We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:

“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”

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Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, just discovered:

“It’s such a pity that nobody knows any history, or it would be quite obvious what so-called Scottish ‘Independence’ is about. Our continental enemies sought for centuries to detach Scotland from England, to weaken us. Now they’re doing it again. 

If Scotland breaks away from England, it won’t be run from Edinburgh, but from Brussels and Frankfurt, and Scots will discover what it’s really like to be someone else’s subject province. I’m sure they’ll have more sense.”

God DAMN it! Who knew we were just the unwitting dupes of the Belgians all along?

Step 1: Write an offensive, provocative piece of trollbait for the Daily Mail, describing your opponents as “kilted bum-barers who bellow ‘freedom’ whenever an English person hoves into view” and suggesting that a Yes vote is an abdication of morality.

(If you can then somehow get the Guardian to reprint it, bonus!)

Step 2: Whine like a baby when you get the response you wanted all along.

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When we started the week with news of the UK government’s statement on debt, we wondered aloud whether it would be a game-changing moment. Judging by the No camp’s reaction since then, shrieking and flailing and lashing out blindly in all directions simultaneously, our question’s been answered.

It’s been hard to keep track of it all, but we’ll have a go.

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So, Ruth Davidson’s been digging herself a big hole on Twitter since yesterday.

We’ve been trying unsuccessfully since last night to find any of these “cabernats” [sic] who’ve supposedly been “outraged” by Mr Hague’s comments. As yet we haven’t managed to locate a single tweet complaining about them. But Davidson’s remarks piqued our curiosity about what Hague had actually said, since we hadn’t yet seen the speech he’ll be giving in Scotland today.

So we went and tracked it down, and suddenly we found ourselves outraged.

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Alistair Darling double-teamed Scotland’s current affairs shows last night, appearing at length on both Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland in order to blink furiously in turn at first Bernard Ponsonby and then Gordon Brewer.

The STV man largely wasted his opportunity, spending the bulk of the interview talking about live debates, but Brewer did a much better job of putting Darling on the spot in several areas. Indeed, with the “Better Together” chairman’s very first words onscreen, the BBC interviewer drew from him a huge and fundamental lie that sits at the very heart of the independence debate. Stand back, because here it comes.

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We got an email last night with regard to yesterday’s piece about a bizarre story in the Daily Record. We thought it was worth sharing with you. The emphasis is ours.

“I’m a lawyer and many years ago worked for the Scottish Office drafting ‘exchange cover’ contracts to deal with fluctuations in the value of currencies between parties from different countries. Sometimes the contract dealt with Swiss Francs, sometimes Deutschmarks or US Dollars and so on.

From what you have printed in your article, it seems that this is not such a contract but it does the same job another way. It makes the person sending the invoice (the contractor) send all their bills to the Scottish Government in one currency only – the pound Sterling. It also provides that they will only receive payment in Sterling. 

In other words it’s an affirmation of the use of Sterling now and in the future by the Scottish Government. I don’t know who the ‘top’ lawyer alluded to is but he or she is talking mince.

Regards, 
George Gebbie
Faculty of Advocates.”

(“Mince” is an obscure legal term. You wouldn’t understand.)

Whatever your political views, this is a very important year. The commentators, the politicians and the so-called experts will all be heard ad nauseam – but ultimately it’s you and me, the ‘ordinary’ people of Scotland, who will decide our nation’s future.

But however Scotland votes in September, what is even more important is that the people of this country seize this opportunity to take our democracy back. For whether we’re governed from Westminster or Holyrood is almost irrelevant unless democracy – real democracy – is reawakened.

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It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.

So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.

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The only way never to be caught out, it’s said, is to always tell the truth, because then you never have to worry about remembering which lies you told to who. And since we’d be lying if we told you that we weren’t enjoying watching the No campaign’s catalogue of falsehood beginning to turn in on itself, as one lie attacks another, we won’t bother.

The UK government’s dramatic debt announcement this week may have marked the opening of the floodgates. Because, to complete this appalling car-crash of mixed metaphors, the whole rotten edifice is starting to crumble down about their ears.

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This is hereditary Westminster Labour MP Anas Sarwar in yesterday’s Evening Times:

“Now, it’s been said by some that there is no passion in the case that we are better together as part of the United Kingdom.

Well, the people saying that obviously haven’t been at any of the rallies I have been at across Scotland, and where I spoke about an idea much bigger than independence; the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK for the benefit of everyone in the UK.”

Hang on – “rallies”? Were we watching the wrong channel when we missed the tens of thousands of people packing the streets for the Great Rally Of The Union? Were we passed out in a cupboard for the whole time when the Anas Sarwar Evangelical Roadshow filled football stadia in every corner of the land with crazed disciples waving Union Jacks and chanting “POOL AND SHARE! POOL AND SHARE!”?

Rallies? What on Earth is the truth-averse wee twerp talking about? We need a doctor.

…about the shameful, despicable sectarian comments by TV celebrity and occasional politician George Galloway in an Edinburgh Evening News article today, about how he’s been refused permission by West Lothian Council to put on his anti-independence “Just Say Naw” roadshow at a municipal venue in Livingston.

But then we kept reading, because we don’t like to go off half-cocked without getting the full story, and were richly rewarded for our effort by a magnificently deadpan line from the paper’s reporter. We’ve unsubtly bolded it for you below.

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