Wings Over Scotland

When we commissioned our poll, we were about 50/50 in terms of whether the mainstream media would cover it. When the results came in, we cautiously shifted to 60/40 in favour. No matter how piqued the press was about this site’s scrutiny of it for the last year and a half, we reasoned, these results were dynamite and surely couldn’t be ignored by any journalist with a shred of conscience or dignity.

Who would have thought that we, of all people, could be guilty of so over-estimating the integrity and professionalism of Scotland’s newspapers and broadcasters?

Read the rest of this entry →

We learned yesterday, in perhaps not the most groundbreaking journalistic scoop of all time, that people don’t much trust politicians. While Scots were much more inclined to believe what they were told by the Yes campaign than the No one, the majority still thought they were being told more fibs than truth by everyone concerned.

What, then, of those whose job it is to scrutinise our politicians, dig down through all the spin and evasion for the facts and tell the public what they need to know?

Read the rest of this entry →

We thought we might as well take advantage of an excellent new facility revealed to us by an alert reader last night, whereby we can now link you to permanent full copies of web pages without directing traffic to the website in question or faffing around with awkward and flaky things like Google Cache.

Unsurprisingly totally ignoring yesterday’s dramatic poll revelations, the Scotsman’s big political story this morning is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall throwing a barely-believable playground tantrum about Alex Salmond saying some words that Mr McDougall likes to say.

You can read it, without earning the Scotsman any undeserved ad revenue, here.

Read the rest of this entry →

David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:

“Next year is the centenary of the start of the Great War and some nationalists in Scotland think Mr Cameron is pulling a Salmond. Coming as it does in August between Bannockburn and the referendum vote, they believe the commemoration has been planned as an artificial booster to Britishness. ‘There’s no conceivable justification or precedent in British history’, complained a Reverend Stuart Campbell, ‘for celebrating the start of a war.’

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

Read the rest of this entry →

Okay, so we know this is teasing, but the results of our poll are in.

They make for amazingly interesting reading, and we’re confident you’re going to feel you got value for your money if you were one of the people who contributed to our absurdly successful fundraiser, which achieved 400% of its target in 72 hours before we had to issue a series of panicked tweets telling people to STOP sending money.

We only got the tables half an hour ago – we’re still digesting it all ourselves and there’s a fair bit of technical admin to do before we can start publishing, and there’s so much info we’re going to have to put it out in instalments so as not to overwhelm you with data, but hold tight. We should have the first release for you tomorrow.

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.)

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →