Wings Over Scotland

Let’s imagine for a second, just for a bit of fun, that this was a prominent SNP or Yes Scotland activist, rather than a Labour one who’s the main contributor to LabourHame and regularly employed by the BBC for some cosy chat on the Sunday Politics.

Charles Green wasn’t using the P-word in a hateful or prejudiced way either, but he got slammed all over the media, chased out of his job and fined £2500. We’re guessing it’s a non-story here, though. Shall we all have a look at the papers tomorrow and find out?

But incredibly, the P-word isn’t even the most offensive thing.

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August 2012:

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We don’t need it in Scotland. Look at the state of reality:

“THE pro-union Better Together campaign has refused to work with UKIP to persuade Scots to vote against ­independence. A Better Together ­spokesman said: “UKIP have asked to join us and we have said no. If they ask again, we will say no again. They are not a Scottish party and this is a Scottish debate.””

We assume this means that the No camp will be giving Ian Taylor his non-Scottish £500,000 back at last, and roundly condemning the interventions of the thoroughly non-Scottish Carwyn Jones in the debate, yes?

The Scottish press has chosen its latest martyr well. Perhaps aware that the average politician – whose day job is basically one long playground name-calling session – doesn’t tend to cut a very convincing figure as the subject of “bullying”, this week the print and broadcast media chose someone a little more sympathetic to portray as a broken, pitiful victim of the Evil Cybernat Hordes: a poor vulnerable wee lassie.

A tiny 4’11”, Susan Calman is nevertheless a former lawyer (who’s worked on Death Row in the USA) as well as a comedian, and one might reasonably expect that she’d be fairly used to both being asked for evidence and being heckled. It’s quite difficult to imagine that any time she was challenged in a courtroom, with someone’s life hanging in the balance, she crumbled in tears at the shock of anybody requesting that she support her case with some sort of verifiable facts.

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Are we doomed to decline if Scotland separates? I can think of lots of good reasons why Scotland might want to vote to remain part of the United Kingdom. But the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee report this week is not one of them.

According to the report, if Scotland votes for independence, it would mean the UK was “a world power in irreversible decline”. Setting aside the question of whether we should expect folk to vote in the interests of geopolitical greatness, does being small mean you’re doomed to be weak? Not at all. The assumption that in geopolitics strength comes from scale is simply not true.

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This is her own agent calling it “apt”, not us, okay?

We’ll be watching avidly to see what her “did it really happen or not?” story is.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones yesterday:

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones today:

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We don’t really want to spend all day discussing things from a single rapidly-declining minority-interest Unionist newspaper, but we spent 69p this morning buying a copy of the Scotsman in order to check some facts on the Susan Calman story, so we’re going to flipping well get our money’s worth.

The paper runs a rather odd piece today, in which the Labour-linked Centre for Public Policy for Regions is called upon to analyse a single Yes Scotland press release relating to the Scottish economy. (A boxout at the end promises a similar treatment for a “Better Together” leaflet at an unspecified point in the future.)

We’ve screenshotted the entire piece here if you want to read it without giving the Scotsman any traffic. But just to give you the flavour of the overarching (or underlying, depending on how you like to look at it) tone, below we’ve stripped out everything except the CPPR’s considered professional assessment.

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Wait, what now? From BBC News:

Several weeks on, we still await answers from the No camp to several serious questions about their biggest donor, Ian Taylor of Vitol. But the ongoing furore (we’re really not sure issuing the Herald with a legal threat worked out the way Mr Taylor hoped it would) over his £500,000 donation has kept attention away from the other substantial contributors to the “Better Together” campaign fund.

Aberdeen local paper the Evening Express has decided to put that right, though.

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We’ve spent a fair bit of time over the course of this website’s existence documenting the multi-media witch-hunts that invariably arise in the Scottish media whenever some obscure and/or anonymous independence supporter on the internet says something slightly intemperate (or even just expresses an unpopular opinion).

We especially enjoy contrasting it against the way that the elected, taxpayer-funded representatives of major political parties can get away unremarked with comparing the First Minister to dictators and genocidal mass murderers (of the sort “Better Together” donors like to give hundreds of thousands of pounds to).

The vast difference in the amount of media weight given to abusive behaviour from British nationalists and that from the independence side (the infamous “cybernats”) has long been a feature of Scottish political debate, but over the last 12 hours the phenomenon has seen an intriguing new twist.

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