Wings Over Scotland

Below is a Daily Record story about lots of people giving money to “Better Together” (although confusingly, apparently it’s for an “election” rather than a referendum), accompanied by a large picture of handsome “Trainspotting” star Kevin McKidd.

One might infer, not unreasonably, from the headline and picture that Mr McKidd was one of the No campaign’s “big-hitters”. There’s nothing at all in the article’s text which would dissuade readers from that view.

But hang on – do they mean THIS Kevin McKidd?

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So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?

After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.

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On the 12th May 1916, a man born 48 years previously in Edinburgh’s Cowgate was strapped to a chair in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin and – after receiving the last rites – was shot by a firing squad. He was too weak to stand.

In 2002 a BBC poll for its presentation of the “100 Greatest Britons” had him in 64th place. Yet he is hardly known in Scotland. Virtually the only time his name impinges on public consciousness is when those who wish to honour his name by public march in Edinburgh have to be given police protection from violent Unionist bigots.

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The Telegraph deserves some credit today. It runs a heartbreaking story about the reality of life on benefits, of the sort both the Conservative and Labour parties want to be “tough” on. It’s a piece of gripping, truthful and hard-hitting journalism, highly and properly critical of the party the paper steadfastly supports. Hats off to the author.

Then you read the comments.

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This site often reflects on the absence of real political choice available to the UK electorate, but it has rarely been more clearly illustrated than it was on this morning’s BBC breakfast news in an interview with Labour’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

Interviewed by presenter Charlie Stayt, Balls first clarified Labour’s position on the top-rate tax cut taking effect this week. Refusing to commit Labour to restoring the 50p rate if elected in 2015, Balls nevertheless made the meaningless pledge that if an election were to be held tomorrow it would be in Labour’s manifesto.

(An interesting distinction from “We would actually do it”, of course.)

We’re a bit puzzled by this. Either a 50p tax rate brings in more money or it doesn’t (and it does – even George Osborne’s own budget statement noted that it raised an extra £1bn for the Treasury compared to the 40p rate that preceded it), so what does it matter what the country’s general economic condition is? Shouldn’t Labour be committed as a matter of principle to wealth redistribution by taxing the rich?

Instead, Balls said that reducing the rate to 45p was “not my priority” (rather than, say, “I think it’s wrong”), suggesting that it was nevertheless something he’d want to do. But it was on welfare reform that he was most revealing.

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When we started this site we never imagined we’d find ourselves citing Aleister Crowley for anything, but it looks as though that strange and disturbing day has come.

We’ve had a theory for a while now that the expenses scandal of 2009 was a watershed moment in British politics, in the worst possible way. Practically the whole of the Westminster parliament was found to have perpetrated frauds against the taxpayer on a scale that would have seen benefit claimants given substantial prison terms, yet almost none were ever put in front of a court.

And despite the huge public outcry at duck houses and moat-cleaning and house-flipping and all the rest of it, when a General Election was called in 2010, the electorate trooped meekly into polling stations and re-elected almost every politician that had been caught with their greedy hands in the voters’ pockets.

Is it any wonder that those same politicians now think – probably correctly – that they can literally get away with just about anything? If we were them, we might be the same. After all, if sheep keep walking up to you when you’ve got shears in your hand, even if you keep gouging their eyes out with them, what else are you going to do?

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The Prime Minister made a rare appearance in Scotland this afternoon, showing up at defence contractors Thales in Govan to answer questions from what the BBC described as “the public”, but looked in fact to have been exclusively employees of the company and who appeared to have been briefed not to ask anything difficult, instead serving up softballs like “What is the government doing to encourage business?” and other similar blandities that we’ve already forgotten five minutes later.

As you can see, he went down a storm.

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Much has been and will be written about David Cameron’s visit to Scotland today, during which he’s expected to vigorously advocate the continuation and renewal of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent”. Which didn’t deter Iraq from invading Kuwait, or Argentina from invading UK territory in the Falklands, but never mind.

(We’re also not clear on why North Korea or Iran would have any sort of beef with an independent Scotland anyway, as opposed to the UK. It seems to this website that the surest way for Scotland to avoid even the microscopically minuscule future prospect of an attack from either nation is to disentangle ourselves from Westminster’s much-hated foreign policy with all possible haste.)

But none of it will be as telling as a single line in the Telegraph today:

“Mr Cameron insists the Trident programme offers good value – at an annual cost of 1.5 per cent of Britain’s benefits bill.”

Could he have made it any clearer? The savage, failing austerity and welfare “reform” programme designed to annihilate the last remnants of civilised British society is explicitly contrasted with the “bargain” we’re getting by spending our money on a useless weapon system designed solely to murder millions in vengeance after we’re already dead. That’s what the United Kingdom stands for, Labour and Tory together.

The argument that Cameron is stealthily trying to sabotage the No campaign in order to shore up the Conservatives’ powerbase in England gets more convincing daily.

Iain Banks blew my mind. I read The Wasp Factory as a teenager when it came out in 1984, and I’d simply never encountered anything like it. I devoured it in an afternoon.

Until then my library had consisted pretty much solely of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books – brilliant and funny and quietly profound, but essentially lightweight stuff. The most “adult” literature I’d tackled was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an agonisingly painful experience that took nearly six months of teeth-gritted determination to plough through, one hideous chapter at a time, waiting for a promised epiphany of knowledge and understanding that never arrived. It single-handedly gave me a dislike of hippies that endures to this day.

The Wasp Factory was a revelation. Dark, disturbing, but funny and ultimately uplifting, it was at once both palpably Scottish and nationless. I hovered outside bookshops waiting for Banks’ subsequent releases – Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Espedair Street. Every one was utterly different from the last, united only by the warm, optimistic spirit of humanity underpinning them. I’m a natural misanthrope, but every time I read one of Iain Banks’ novels I’m turned away from despair towards hope again.

I made sure I took them with me when I left home, and they sit in my bookshelf still, growing more well-thumbed with the years. And when Banks moved into science-fiction, I came along for the ride. His undramatic, matter-of-fact depiction of an enlightened “post-scarcity” galactic Utopia – the Culture – was beautiful and politically thrilling, and as a young videogame obsessive the author’s clear connection with and understanding of the alternative worlds offered by games reached out to me in an incredibly direct and personal way that Douglas Adams’ work hadn’t.

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It’s just been brought to our attention by an alert reader that we’ve been shamefully failing in the months since the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement to give credit where it’s due to Scotland’s champion in Westminster, the Rt. Hon. Michael Moore:

“Stephen [Williams, Lib Dem MP] is clearly a strong liberal voice for young people. We should be helping him build an unstoppable momentum for permanent change following the Independence Referendum next year, where another Liberal Democrat, Michael Moore, has secured the right of 16 and 17 year olds to vote.“

What with that and Jenny Marra MSP apparently being single-handedly responsible for the ending of the split-tickets fiasco on ScotRail (1hr 41m), it looks like we owe all the Unionist parties a big vote of thanks today. Our gratitude is literally unmeasurable.

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As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

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