Wings Over Scotland

It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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Last night’s debate, as seen by studio pundits Bernard Ponsonby and Colin Mackay.

We can only commend STV on its generous supplies of green-room hospitality.

Anas Sarwar’s boorish embarrassment of a performance on last night’s STV debate doesn’t deserve a post of its own, frankly. As the Glasgow MP who thinks Scotland is a dictatorship oafishly shouted idiotic slogans over the top of Nicola Sturgeon non-stop for 45 minutes, all we could hear were the same old hollow canards Labour have been repeating for months on end, and which haven’t changed a bit in all that time.

So rather than expend any effort on debunking them again, here’s an encore.

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Almost every newspaper today reported a declaration by George Osborne that a No vote would result in a boost to Scottish family incomes of a dramatic-sounding £2,000. The headline figure, which some papers gave a more negative spin, was actually a cumulative sum spread over 30 years (because “£67 a year per family”, or £1.29 a week, sounds rather less impressive as a compelling case for the Union).

It hinged on forecast economic growth of 4% – due to “extra trade, labour migration and cross-border investment” – compared to that in an independent Scotland.

Those are two pretty sweeping predictions. Is the Chancellor that good a fortune-teller?

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There’s something subtly different about the wording of these two Scotsman headlines.

Well, not very subtle. Can you spot it, readers? Tell us your answers in the comments.

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We’ve been hearing tales today of people who signed up for the top secret “public meeting” of No Glasgow yesterday and received written confirmation that their application had been successful, but were then mysteriously refused admission when they arrived – a curious occurrence when by most accounts there were 70-80 seats going begging in the 400-seater auditorium.

We, naturally, had about 50 spies in the room, one of whom audio-recorded the entire thing. We’re still plugging our way through it – it’s hard to maintain focus when the tired old platitudes you’ve heard a hundred times already drone on and on from the stage, and we keep finding we’ve forgotten we’re listening and have wandered off to do the hoovering or something.

By far the most compelling argument we’ve heard so far, though, came from a gentleman in the audience. It’s transcribed below. Take a moment to read it.

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Well, it’s been quite a week, readers. Over the course of the last seven days, Wings Over Scotland – and in particular myself, as its editor – has been subjected to an unprecedented series of smear attacks from several groups of alarmingly angry people, from “Better Together” activists (sometimes in unholy alliance with a small handful of confused, naive young SNP student sorts) to senior Scottish journalists, failed Tory election candidates, psychopathic stalkers and Rangers supporters.

I’ve personally been called – in the space of just that single week – homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist, disablist, ageist, fascist, sectarian, a rape apologist, anti-English, anti-Welsh and a hate-preaching bigot. All are entirely untrue, of course.

(Just about the only people I’m apparently NOT prejudiced against are left-handed unicycling vegan budgie-owners from Fermanagh. Which is doubly ironic, because I really loathe those smug, cack-fisted carrot-munchers.)

If you want to know why, look below.

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We’re just going through some reports from the top-secret “public meeting” of the No campaign in Glasgow today. Scores of empty seats (in a venue holding hundreds fewer than the packed-out Yes Glasgow launch), a fracas involving someone protesting about Trident, and the same tired old lines from the same tired old faces.

The pick of the bunch so far, though, came from Willie Rennie, who warned that “The Nationalists are right about the success of the parliament, but with independence devolution ends”. Yes, of course it does, you hapless balloon. Because when you arrive at your destination, you don’t need to travel any more.

If devolution is “a process, not an event”, then the only possible endpoint of that process is independence. Devolution is the return of more powers to the Scottish Parliament. When all powers are returned, of course there’s no more need for devolution. All the referendum represents is a shortcut – getting where we want to go in one leap without wrangling over the constitution non-stop for the next 40 years.

We can only imagine Willie Rennie burns his toast a lot.

We’d imagine, in fairness, that you need to be endowed with a pretty well-polished brass neck to stand as a Conservative politician in Scotland at all.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the sheer nerve of Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson yesterday as she gave a speech to an audience (if that’s not too strong a word in the circumstances) of “around 25” people in Edinburgh.

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Saturday is notionally our comedy day, but it’s nice to see the Scotsman joining in with the fun this week. We’re rapidly coming to the conclusion that the failing paper is now being operated as some sort of elaborate ironic prank, and the lead home-news story this morning does nothing to dispel that theory.

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Having spent the best part of two years shining an unforgivingly critical spotlight on the Scottish and UK media, we can have no complaints when we come under the same sort of scrutiny. So we didn’t mind a bit when the right-wing Spectator columnist (is there any other kind?) Alex Massie had something of a swing at us yesterday in a no-punches-pulled column entitled “The Closing of the Nationalist Mind”.

The theme of the piece was the beastly manner in which awful cybernats, typified by ourselves, refuse to even countenance the other side of the argument. Ooft!

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STV this morning reports a speech to be given today by Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, in which she issues some blood-curdling warnings about the chaotic impact of independence on Scottish trade with the UK.

There are a couple of things Ms Davidson should probably know.

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