Wings Over Scotland

The Herald publishes a rather interesting story today, revealing that according to professional media analysts Brandwatch, almost three quarters of social media users in Scotland are planning to vote Yes in the referendum.

(For some reason the Herald chose to publish the piece under the headline “Davey doubts Scotland will reach green energy target”, which we’ll put down to the heat, and to emphasise the notion that the high level of support was “despite” the SNP.)

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Scottish nationalist style:

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Former Labour MEP Hugh Kerr in the Herald, 12 Jun 2013:

“I am on holiday in Denmark and independence is the topic all Danes want to discuss when they learn you are from Scotland. I have met no-one yet who is opposed to Scotland’s independence. One said to me yesterday: ‘Surely it is natural to want to run your own affairs, we certainly wouldn’t want to be run by Sweden.’

I have also discussed it with some former colleagues from the European Parliament who are certain Scotland would be warmly welcomed as members of all European institutions; as one put it: ‘After all, you have been members of the EU for 40 years, you are hardly going to be excluded now’.”

To be honest, readers, if Scotland votes No in 2014 our main life priority is going to be developing a convincing Welsh or Irish accent. It’d just be far too embarrassing and depressing to constantly have to try to explain it to the rest of the world otherwise.

Alistair Darling’s gremlin-plagued “positive case for the Union” speech in Glasgow yesterday, even leaving aside the weakness of its tired, reheated arguments (basically the same old “We cannae dae it” doom and gloom resprayed with an atom-thin coat of All-New Positivitrex!) might be the most boring thing we’ve ever read.

It drones on for a soul-sapping 26 pages and we can’t imagine how long it must have seemed when you were stuck in the room hearing it in Darling’s querulous, vexatious voice, but there’s one saving grace: the graphs. There are no fewer than 23 frequently-incomprehensible boxes, charts and diagrams, of which this is our favourite.

We’re not sure they’ve quite grasped how polling works.

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We’ve been substantially updating yesterday’s feature on the financial strength of an independent Scotland, based on the calculations by the pro-Union economist Prof. Brian Ashcroft. Thanks to the readers who pointed out some of the finer detail.

The results, we think you’ll agree, are pretty breathtaking.

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Oh dear, here we go again. The latest Scotsman/SoS poll yesterday afternoon:

And here it is this morning:

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Got stuff to write about today. Should really comment on Henry McLeish’s cutting observations about the No campaign, or mock the Daily Record’s hilarious attempt to pretend Johann Lamont’s been driving Labour action over Falkirk all along. But I can’t seem to put sentences together, because I’m still trembling a bit after watching this.

It’s hard to relate it to the Scottish independence debate, except to note that where the US goes, the UK is rarely far behind. (In much the same way that a devolved Scotland ends up following the policies of England within a few years, because without control of your own revenues, taxation and welfare there’s only so much you can juggle a decreasing budget to try to offset the effects.)

I don’t want a “special relationship” any more. I want out.

We don’t often have cause to praise the actions of Tory councillors, so allow us to take the opportunity to salute Cllr David Meikle of Pollokshields for this intervention against braying Spectator idiot (and former star of our Zany Comedy Relief section) Fraser Nelson:

Ooft! Oddly, Nelson hasn’t rushed to also claim Gordon Reid as “British”, despite his being so in just the same way Andy Murray is – perhaps because Gordon and his Dutch doubles partner in fact lost their semi-final yesterday against the top seeds.

We’d previously dismissed the complaint as a tired old nationalist chip-on-the-shoulder hobbyhorse, but it seems that – to BritNats like Nelson at least – it really IS true that sportspeople from Scotland are British when they win and Scottish when they lose.

In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

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It’s quite difficult to construct a rational case for why an independent Scotland would need an army at all. A couple of battalions for emergencies can’t hurt, but beyond that level ground forces are something of an affectation for a small country like ours.

Given Scotland’s location, the threat of invasion is essentially zero. Only one nation has attempted to invade Scotland in the last thousand years – the sole country with which we have a land border – and we doubt that even the wildest fringes of the nationalist movement really think England would try it again in the forseeable future.

(And if they did, frankly, the biggest army we could plausibly hope to ever field would have very little chance of stopping them. Ditto Russia, China, North Korea, Guatemala, giant space dinosaurs or whoever the latest Project Fear fantasy bogeyman is.)

Nevertheless, we’re a bit confused by the dire warnings currently being issued by all and sundry regarding the difficulty of recruiting soldiers to such a force.

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We got an email from the Electoral Commission today. Further to our attempts to discern the membership of “Scottish Labour” last week, we’d dropped them a line with a couple of queries about which information parties and their sub-divsions (or “accounting units”) were required to divulge.

The answers weren’t particularly surprising, but they did give us an idea.

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The first minute is January to May of 2011. From around 1m 12s, the glass represents the next two years’ referendum polling. Julianne Moore plays the parties of the Union. (Jeff Goldblum is the SNP throughout.) Technically speaking nothing changes for quite a prolonged period. Positions are maintained. But something’s happening.

That’s just how we interpret the situation. We could be wrong, of course.