Wings Over Scotland

This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.

It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.

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Now here’s an explosive thing to drop at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night.

Click the image to read the full Financial Times story. Did the game just change?

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It’s a fortunate thing, viewers, that we have a strong will, hardened by years of dreich, endless 1970s Sundays in Scotland with only three channels on the telly (each of them showing programmes entirely about farming and God), everything outside shut except the rainclouds, and nothing to look forward to but school in the morning.

Because otherwise the frustrations of yesterday’s site problems, followed by waking up this morning to be faced with papers stuffed to the brim with miserable, bleating old Scottish Labour dinosaurs with torn coupons and long catalogues of whinges about you-know-who and you-know-what might just have pushed us over the edge.

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Hello again! We apologise for the recent 19-hour interruption to normal Wings Over Scotland service, which was almost certainly the result of a cyber-attack by the KGB.

Not really, of course. A combination of a badly-coded plugin, human error and the global curse of spam comments is most likely what actually took us offline for most of yesterday and this morning. But in the light of today’s Sunday Herald front-page scoop, it’s hard to be absolutely sure.

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Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.

The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.

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…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.

“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)

So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.

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Just a wee round-up.

“Plan for Ukip ‘vote swap’ with Tories to to keep Miliband out of No. 10

Writer and Conservative campaigner Toby Young plans to launch a website that will encourage Conservatives and Ukip supporters to pledge to swap votes in margnial constiuencies”

We’re going to assume they mean “marginal” and “constituencies” there. (Even the Telegraph can’t afford sub-editors now?) But hey, it’s a comforting thought, right?

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Just a quick one, folks. Here’s a story we touched on earlier today, that appeared in today’s Scotsman and Daily Record. (It even briefly showed up in the Herald, but was deleted faster than we could save it.) At first glance it appears to be identical in both papers, but it isn’t. In fact there’s a rather substantial difference. Can you spot it?

Yesterday saw one of the odder incidents to date in the Scottish media’s coverage of the independence debate. Both the Herald and Scotsman ran almost word-for-word-identical articles reporting the findings of a Glasgow University study into the nature of the debate on Twitter, which concluded (in line with previous research) that Yes campaigners were far more active on the social network than No ones, and that the Yes campaign was far more grassroots than its “top-down” opponent.

We were pleased to get a namecheck in both pieces, but the curious aspect was the length that the articles went to in order to provide a couple of examples of “unofficial” No advocates. It’s now over a year since we first observed the death of Unionist blogging, so it’s understandable that the study had trouble digging anything up, but the representatives they settled on boggled quite a few minds.

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We were a little bemused to read in today’s Herald (and also to hear on “Good Morning Scotland”) of the appointment of Professor Jim Gallagher as an official adviser to “Better Together”. Not because we’d been in any doubt about the academic’s views on independence, but because the Herald had already identified Prof. Gallagher as the No campaign’s “Director of Research” in a referendum supplement back in December.

Indeed, the Herald article goes on to note that “Mr Gallagher has been working behind the scenes for Better Together for several months”. So today seems a pertinent moment to revisit a letter we sent after reading the supplement to Ian Stewart, the editor of The Scotsman, and to which we’re still awaiting a response.

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Lord McConnell got the velvet-lined kid-gloves treatment from Scotland Tonight last night over his calls for the pro- and anti-independence campaigns to have a two-week ceasefire during the Commonwealth Games. Mysteriously, the programme didn’t feel it was at all relevant to draw comparisons to how the No camp behaved during the last major sporting event that took place in the UK.

No, definitely no politicking going on there.

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This wasn’t online when we wrote this morning’s piece, but it is now:

“Labour now find themselves opposing a move welcomed by just about anyone with anything to say about education and the eradication of poverty.

Labour are now at loggerheads with charities and campaigners like the EIS teaching union, the STUC, the Unison union and Save the Children, not to mention the Child Poverty Action Group.

These are organisations Labour should surely be on the right side of.”

(“Record View”, the Daily Record, 8 Jan 2014.)