Wings Over Scotland

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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It’s very rare, viewers, that we get so angry in the course of writing a post that we have to stop.

But when we ran a picture last night of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP, opening a foodbank with a cretinous smile on his face as if being a member of the government of a modern industrial nation in need of foodbanks was something to be happy about, a reader suggested making a gallery of similar images.

This is as many as we could bear.

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Wings Over Scotland went to London last weekend, for no particular reason other than a change of scenery. After a trip to the faux-bohemian Camden Market – in which about six different stalls are now repeated over and over in a sad, gentrified mockery of its previous more anarchic life, yet while still maintaining much of the vibrant feel – we set off in no particular direction and found ourselves in Trafalgar Square.

Despite having been to the capital dozens of times, I’d never visited the home of Nelson’s Column, which is far bigger in real life than it looks in pictures, managing to dominate what is a very large plaza with no shortage of other imposing monuments and decorations. (Including the vast National Gallery and, at the moment, an incongruous enormous bright blue cockerel.)

Suitably inspired, we elected to take a stroll to the Embankment, past the London Eye, and from there on a walking tour of the heart of the British establishment. Searching for exploitable weaknesses, obviously.

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From a heavily-spun Huffington Post piece on Scotland’s relationship with the monarchy, in which Dennis Canavan expressing a personal opinion when asked a question becomes an “outburst”. You know the sort of thing. (The story was also reported in the Telegraph as “Yes camp in disarray”, before a hasty rewrite.)

It’s an interesting definition of “overwhelming majority”, we’ll grant you. But it might explain why the No campaign apparently thinks it has the referendum won already.

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Just one to go.

Come on, Mr McDougall, you and your man know where we are.

As yet we’ve had no replies from anyone to our invitation to the Yes and No camps to conduct a public head-to-head independence debate. Dennis Canavan is on holiday at the moment, but none of Blair McDougall, Alistair Darling, Blair Jenkins or the official Yes and No campaigns have bothered to respond at all, despite both regularly proclaiming that they want to get the public more involved in the discussion.

It’s a dismally poor show from both sides. We’ll keep you posted.

We just had to have a lie down after wading through Tory councillor Tom Kerr’s speech in Bathgate last night. We don’t know if we dare inflict the full incoherent horror of it on you, to be honest. But something quite interesting happened after it.

A local activist stood up and asked Blair McDougall if David Cameron was prepared to debate Alex Salmond on independence, and his answer was enlightening.

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