Wings Over Scotland

If there’s one phrase that has long bedevilled the Liberal party and its descendants, it’s ‘home rule’. What are we supposed to understand by it? And perhaps more to the point, what do modern Lib Dems understand by it?

If you go back in Liberal history to the time of the great William Gladstone, ‘home rule’ meant something. It meant the principle of self-governance for Ireland, with certain powers reserved to Westminster.

Gladstone’s idea of home rule was very similar to what we now call Devo Max. And when Gladstone stood up for this principle and fought to drive it through parliament, he was attacked in terms we recognise only too well today.

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Dear Margaret,

I have quite the conundrum. I wonder if you could help me with it.

My Scots-born best friend moved to Beijing in 2005. She previously spent a year studying in Canada, but when she came back I found no traces of latent Canadianism.

Over the last few years she has learned to speak Mandarin quite competently. She also works for the EU. That could be another nail in her coffin, right?

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For those of you who – inexplicably and frankly rather hurtfully – STILL don’t follow us on Twitter and may therefore not have heard the news yet on your gramophones, this evening’s Scotland Tonight promises to be a real treat.

Not so much for the fact that they’ll be referencing our poll, but because they’ll be doing so as the jumping-off point for a discussion between Dennis Canavan (chairman of Yes Scotland) and Ian Davidson MP, on the subject “Are undecided voters in the independence referendum more socialist, more republican, & more green?”, which should be like watching Rab C Nesbitt give David Bowie fashion tips.

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(Data.)

We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.

First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.

Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.

(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)

We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.

As all the cool, good-looking people who follow us on Twitter will already know, the results of our second crowd-funded poll are in. The data tables only arrived around teatime, so we won’t be publishing anything until Sunday, because we have to analyse a great big mountain of info, write some posts about it and get those posts cleared by Panelbase, all of which takes a wee while.

But allow us to offer you the odd little teaser snippet.

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We were a little confused as we caught up with our Twitter timeline this morning.

Brilliant result? What?

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With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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Latvia has been ruled by others for most of the past thousand years, with Riga even being the largest city in Sweden until they carelessly lost it to Peter the Great in 1710. Independence from Russia came in 1918 and then from the Soviet Union in 1991.

I arrived in Riga a few months later and stayed for a year and a half. At the time I joked that, apart from my paid work, I was there to observe what they were going through and to take notes for when Scotland became independent. It’s been a long time but some things, I hope, will be relevant to the process over the next year.

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We’ve been digging around behind the scenes for the last few days now trying to make sense of the labyrinthine tangle of claim and counter-claim over what’s going on at the Ineos refinery and petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth. The press is full of competing assertions from the various parties involved, so we’re just going to tell you what we know for sure and see where it ends up.

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Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk, 23 October 2013:

“The announcement by Ineos this morning that Grangemouth’s petrochemical plant is to close is terrible news. Hundreds of jobs lost directly, many more indirectly. The loss of a significant element of Scotland’s industrial capacity. Why has this happened?

Ineos has been flagging likely cuts for months but instead of engaging with the situation and organising a coherent plan to save jobs, Unite called a strike over a pathetic and petty issue related to Labour Party internal politics. By the time the union woke up to the reality workers faced, it was too late.”

Sounds about right to us. Mind how you vote tomorrow, Dunfermline folk.

The coalition government’s horrific new immigration bill passed its first hurdle in the House Of Commons last night by 303 votes to 18.

The administration that brought us vans touring cities telling foreigners to leave or be arrested, gangs of armed officers sweeping tube stations for any dark-skinned undesirables, British citizens being harassed by text message and incomers to Scotland met with UK Border Agency posters urging them to go home intends to make life even more wretched and intolerable for vulnerable refugees and people who want to come here and contribute to our economy and culture.

And Labour? Labour bravely abstained from the vote.

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