Wings Over Scotland

Ooh, we haven’t had one of these for a while. Browsing the newspapers on our iPad this morning before getting up, we noticed an interesting headline in the Scotsman.

Intrigued, we clicked on it to see if it was a standard-issue scare story in the paper’s “Scottish independence” section, and were pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t. In fact, the warned-of tax rises or cuts in services were those which would follow a No vote in the referendum, as they’re those planned by UK Chancellor George Osborne.

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If you hate listening to audio or watching video (as opposed to reading the printed word) as much as we do, or if you’re just at work and can’t, here’s a complete transcript – courtesy of one of our splendid readers – of this morning’s BBC Breakfast appearance from UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

Once again, the very last line of the transcript is the killer.

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You might want to wrap some bandaging around your jaw before listening to this BBC News interview with UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom this morning, to keep it off the floor.

It gets more and more mindboggling as it goes on. But it’s not the chilling thing.

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A reader posted this clip in a comment last night and we’ve already tweeted it earlier this morning, but it really deserves to be seen as widely as possible.

(If you’re in a hurry, you can skip straight to 1m 50s.)

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We were forwarded this email today from a reader who’d contacted “Better Together” to express their concern about the deeply troubling recent events where UK Border Agency police have been harassing non-white people at tube stations and elsewhere, and wanted to know their view on it.

This was the reply they got.

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A reader recently sent us an article from Humanitie, the magazine of the Humanist Society of Scotland, in which (apparently after much delay in finding anyone willing to put the No camp’s case) a “Better Together” activist made the case for the Union, in response to a Yes piece in the preceding issue. You can read it by clicking the image.

We’ve carefully redacted the person’s identity, because we don’t want to make this personal. But reading through the litany of tired old falsehoods, we were overcome not with anger or even contempt, but with sorrow.

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We’d never heard of this until a reader mentioned it this morning in the comments, and it seems worth bringing to wider attention. The article we’re about to (re)print below is a transcript originally created by the now-defunct www.alba.org, along with a couple of extracts from the Scottish press of the time.

The original version is still visible on www.archive.org, but we’ve tidied it up a bit and added a few notes and comments of our own in red.

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You can call us crazy ideological extremists if you like. But after the Scottish press continued to obsess utterly ridiculously at the weekend over whether some Yes supporters might be working together on the Yes campaign with some other Yes supporters, we’re at least not going to be short of company in that regard.

So rather than engage in a farcical witch-hunt about whether members of Labour For Independence had ever once been photographed buying (wee) sausage rolls from THE EXACT SAME BRANCH OF GREGGS THAT SOMEONE IN THE SNP REGULARLY USES, we had the mad thought that we might, y’know, ask some of its members some questions about Labour and independence and stuff.

We’ll never get anywhere in the Scottish media with that sort of approach.

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So, slightly to our surprise, we actually just got a reply from Blair McDougall to our email offering to put on a debate between Alistair Darling and Dennis Canavan at a mutually-convenient time and location and with a neutral host.

You can read it below.

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Michael Moore is the Secretary of State for Scotland.

Keep that in mind when you read the next line.

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Some of the more cynical independence supporters among our readership may today be asking themselves “What is it that Labour are trying to bury today with all this ludicrously farcical ‘Labour For Independence’ business?” 

Allow us to suggest a few possibilities.

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Labour voters are going to be key in deciding the outcome of the independence referendum. Even if everyone who voted SNP, Green or SSP in the last Holyrood election voted Yes in 2014, it wouldn’t be quite enough to secure a 50%+1 result.

But with polls consistently showing 15-20% of Labour voters are already in favour of independence, and also that a huge majority are dissatisfied with the status quo, it can be no surprise that the Unionist parties and media are extremely nervous of any growth in the Labour Yes faction.

But while nerves are one thing, blind panic is another.

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