Wings Over Scotland

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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Today’s editorial leader in Scotland on Sunday is really interesting, from a language nerd’s perspective (ie very much on our turf). Entitled “A warning to No campaign”, the column – nominally on the subject of pensions under devolution – purports to criticise said group, noting that “the Better Together campaign, by repeatedly presenting the idea of change as a threat, is doing Scotland no favours.”

But lurking just barely below the surface is an entirely different agenda.

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A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.

(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)

A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.

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We should, if for nothing else, commend the No campaign for gradually learning from experience. Much hilarity ensued when it attempted to claim an independent Scotland would need to renegotiate “14,000 treaties”, and even more fun was had when it produced a list of 500 (actually 507) “questions” about independence.

So we applaud the UK government for dialling down the crazy a notch and producing another doom-and-gloom list of reasons why it would be impossible for Scotland to achieve what around 150 countries have managed to achieve in the last century or so, but which restricts itself to just a modest 200 entries.

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