Wings Over Scotland

While browsing the Trade Unionists For Independence page earlier today, a story from the website of SNP Paisley MSP George Adam caught our eye. We’re unable to verify its claims, but since that wasn’t a problem for the entire UK media over Susan Calman, we offer it as an item of interest anyway. We might just give William Hill and Coral a ring tomorrow and check it out for ourselves.

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Things must be grim at Project Fear HQ if things have gotten this desperate and amateurish 15 months out. The latest speculative FearBomb is that “mobile phone companies could introduce roaming charges when people cross over the border.”

(Coupled, rather excellently, with the assertion that “Scottish independence could also drive up the cost of posting letters”, apparently under the impression that we’ve all forgotten the price of a stamp in the UK rocketing by a eye-watering 39% last year.)

We all love our mobile phones, so that would be an excellent piece of scarework – if only it was more than a fortnight since the EU announced that roaming charges are to be abolished in Europe by July 2014, two months before the independence referendum and almost two years before Scotland would actually be independent.

Come on, guys, it’s like you’re not even trying any more.

On the rare occasions when we can briefly drag ourselves away from the Wings Over Scotland coalface and the brutal, unforgiving lash of our slavedriver readers, we enjoy a social game of poker. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from poker, it’s that shuffling a terrible hand doesn’t magically transform it into a good one. We’ve tried.

So we suspect the SNP will be rather less than quaking in their boots at today’s news that Labour have decided to reunite the dream team of Johann Lamont and Iain Gray that was such a resounding success when they were the party’s leader and deputy leader (not in that order) in 2011.

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We might have to make this a regular mirror strand to “Quoted for truth”. We’re struggling to get our heads round a particularly dim-witted piece in today’s Scotsman by Gregor Gall, a left-wing academic who the paper notes is “professor of industrial relations at the University of Bradford and lives in Edinburgh”. (Tough commute.)

It’s full of all manner of illogical cobblers (we have a feeling that we saw The Illogical Cobblers supporting Birdland at the Edinburgh Venue in about 1989, but that’s another story), from which one passage really leaps out with its underpants on its head.

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The longer this site goes on, the more we realise we could really do with some sort of proper indexing system, rather than relying on our bullet-riddled memory to be able to recall the details of something we wrote a year ago.

So in the week that the “Better Together” campaign celebrated its first birthday, and we learned that it refers to itself internally as “Project Fear”, we thought we’d collect a few of our favourite impressions of it from its own supporters (and the odd neutral) in one place where they might be easier to find.

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I’m going to do something I only do rarely and write this post in the personal pronoun, because it’s very much a personal view rather than an attempt to speak for a wider section of the independence movement. But although it’s been forming for a while, it was finally triggered by an Ian Bell comment piece in the Herald today.

You should read it all, but the key paragraph is this one:

“You have to pause, then, and ask yourself why policies that have failed for three long years cause barely a whisper of argument in Westminster. The only sensible inference, surely, is that what looks like failure to some is a very satisfactory state of affairs to others.”

That simple, understated last sentence cuts to the very heart of why Scots will stand at the edge of a terrible abyss in September 2014, with a herd of buffalo stampeding towards them, and seriously consider NOT grasping at the rope ladder dangling from the last helicopter offering to carry them safely away from the cliff edge.

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Hang on – didn’t our “Project Fear” pals spend half of last year sobbing and wailing and raging that a certain tri-morpheme prefix was leading and unfair and beastly and a clear attempt at rigging the referendum by the dastardly, unprincipled Nats?

Maybe our memory’s playing tricks on us. We’re pretty old.

Stephen Noon in the Scotsman, 25 June 2013:

“The No campaign thinks its biggest strength is fear. However, its biggest weakness is an equally powerful emotion: regret.

Just think how we will feel if there is a No vote; if in 2015 we get another government we didn’t vote for; if in 2016 we’re taken out of the European Union against our own expressed wishes; if in 2017 there are new welfare changes that introduce a lower rate of payment for people in Scotland; or if in 2018 we are still wasting £250 million a year on nuclear weapons.

We’ll regret the lost opportunity that was a Yes in 2014, with an intensity that will be brought to mind again and again. The pain of what could have been will go on.”

It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.

So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.

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A comment from a reader sent us off on a spot of Googling this morning. If you type nothing but the word “Wimbledon” into the search engine, the top result isn’t actually a link, but instead some sort of unclickable wired-in tournament schedule data.

A striking feature of the data is the national flags beside each contestant. We couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we typed in Andy Murray’s name.

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So proud of my country and its government. Let’s get this done.

The weekend’s Scotland on Sunday contained another in a long series of doom-laden predictions about the state of an independent Scotland’s defences, including the assertion that current Scottish soldiers would choose to stay with the British armed forces rather than join Scotland’s because it’d be more exciting.

(Along, as independence supporters would expect, with the standard boilerplate that we’d all be killed by terrorists, and the now-traditional dodgy Scotsman poll.)

The Sunday Times, meanwhile, wasn’t being quite so careful.

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