Wings Over Scotland

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.

London-born, Los Angeles-resident singer Rod Stewart in today’s Scottish Sun:

“Proud Scotland fan Rod Stewart revealed he’d hate to see the break-up of the Union. Rock idol Rod, 68, hopes Scots will snub independence by rallying behind the ‘No’ push in next year’s referendum.

But the veteran singer fears many young voters could be swayed to say ‘Yes’ because of stirring Mel Gibson blockbuster Braveheart.

Rod, whose dad Robert was from Leith, Edinburgh, said: “I’d hate to see the Union broken after all these years — and I don’t think it will happen.”

(We note with passing interest and without comment the paper’s own description of Rod as a “Scotland fan” rather than a “Scot”, and that a few lines later in the same piece he says “as I don’t live there I shouldn’t comment on independence”. Whoops!)

Hmm, what could have brought that on all of a sudden?

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If you ever want to make a Labour activist in Scotland uncomfortable and desperate to change the subject, there’s always been an easy way to do it in a single sentence:

“If the Tories are as bad as you say, why is it better for Scotland to be governed by them for six years out of every ten, even though we never vote for them?”

We’ve been asking that one for years now and never had an answer, for the very good reason that there is only one honest reply – one “Scottish Labour” can never admit.

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Yesterday the No campaign’s Rob Murray responded to allegations of scaremongering by complaining on Twitter that supporters of independence “don’t like debate”.

For some unknown reason he didn’t reply to our observation that “Better Together” has banned hundreds of would-be debaters from its Facebook page for politely raising various awkward issues about “Project Fear”, but later the same day rather more disturbing news reached us of some events in the north of Scotland.

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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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