Wings Over Scotland

Unionists never miss a chance to sneer at “Braveheart”, a film which won five Oscars and tells a true story (very heavily embellished by Hollywood) about a people’s fight for self-determination. Only last night, Scotland Tonight retweeted one eager young No voter using it as an explanation for the increase in support for independence among the 18-24 demographic, even though the film came out almost 20 years ago.

This sort of thing, though, is fine:

That’s because nationalism is great, so long as it’s British.

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There’s a faintly astonishing story in today’s Scotsman. As if belatedly realising the damage that they’d done to the No campaign by detailing Labour’s toys-out-of-pram tantrum in the House Of Commons this week, the paper runs a firefighting exercise of a follow-up piece which reveals no new information, but gives the party a helpful platform from which to try to winch itself out of the hole.

(A “senior party source” duly obliged with the comically-absurd assertion that “the party’s main concern was that without a reference to independence, an MP could be stopped from speaking for going off the subject.”)

That’s not the astonishing part, of course – giving Unionist parties a platform is what the Scotsman exists for. The amazing thing is the size of the gulf between what the story reports as the reason for the debate’s cancellation and what the person whose debate it was had already said in public a full day earlier.

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Fans of TV panel shows will probably be aware of a regular strand on the BBC’s Mock The Week called “Between The Lines”, in which one comedian delivers lines from a speech in the persona of a public figure, while the other translates what they really mean. There’s a chucklesome example here.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to have our own attempt, with a letter sent out this week to the No campaign’s mailing list by the independence debate’s own Hugh Dennis: “Better Together” campaign director and creative truth interpreter Blair McDougall.

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We’ve spoken before on this site about a couple of political concepts based around different ways of winning votes by bombarding the electorate with untruths so relentlessly that they come to be accepted as fact.

One of them, the “Big Lie”, was a term infamously coined by Hitler to describe a strategy regularly deployed by the Nazis in which a falsehood would be perpetrated which was so diametrically and spectacularly at odds with the reality, people would instinctively reject the thought that anyone would have the bare-faced audacity to say it if it wasn’t true, and therefore it must be.

Language needs some kind of brand new term, though, to accurately encapsulate the magnitude of what Scottish Labour have just tried to pull off.

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It defies belief, in a way. It’s now been a full week since we mocked Willie Rennie’s embarrassingly clueless claim that an independent Scotland would need to negotiate “14,000 international treaties”, in a feature which was widely circulated and quoted.

So ridiculed was Rennie’s claim that even the Scotsman couldn’t make it stick, acknowledging on Monday that it had been exaggerated by at least 70%, with a maximum of 8500 actually still being in effect, let alone relevant to Scotland. An entertaining introductory package on last night’s Newsnight Scotland even highlighted our particular favourite of the UK’s treaties.

At which point the programme brought on the rare protected species that is Scotland’s only Tory MP, the Scotland Office minister David Mundell.

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Unionists can often be heard protesting that the phrase “too wee, too poor, too stupid” is a dreadful Nat calumny which nobody on the No side has ever actually uttered. And of course they’re technically right – not even “Better Together” is quite stupid enough (and certainly not honest enough) to come out and use the phrase in its overt form.

A Coalition source said the report would highlight the weakness of Scotland’s negotiating position with the EU if it was to leave the UK, given the size of its population and economy, which would relegate the Scots to Europe’s minor leagues.

“At these European summits, you see all the key players moving around, the French, the Germans and the British. But where are the Danish? They’re nowhere. It’s not that Denmark is not significant, but it’s not as important as these other nations, simply because of its size.”

That quote, taken from a story in today’s Sunday Herald, seems to be pretty closely related to the first two of the unholy trinity, though.

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It sometimes feel as though the jagged, jittery line stretching from Gretna to Berwick isn’t so much a border as a fracture in a mirror, through which things look different according to which side of it you’re standing on.

On its south side, Labour decry a Tory government as the worst thing that can possibly happen. To the north, it’s an inconvenience Scots must bear for six or seven years out of every ten despite always rejecting the Conservatives at the ballot box, because to cast them out decisively would be selfish, childish “narrow nationalism”.

Scottish Labour MSPs abstain from voting for the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons, presenting a transparent lie of opposition to the weapons of global destruction. But something about the short train journey to London persuades Scottish Labour’s MPs to advocate Trident replacement enthusiastically, demanding only to know what else can be cut to ensure there’s enough money for it.

When in Scotland, the Tories and Lib Dems in the coalition government issue dire warnings that an independent Scotland would be cast out of the European Union and into international isolation. Safely back home in England, the Prime Minister promises UK voters a referendum that (according to polls) will achieve that very end.

The Huffington Post quotes the PM today on the subject of Scottish independence.

“He questioned why people should be made to choose between Scotland or Britain when they could be part of both, adding: “Britain works. Britain works well. Why break it?”“

But hang on. “Britain ain’t broke, don’t fix it” wasn’t Mr Cameron’s previous view.

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Remember when some of us made a bit of a fuss about the epically tasteless plans for the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1, and were angrily told by various indignant British nationalists that the planned events were a “commemoration, not a celebration”? Turns out you can’t keep the truth down for long.

Astonishingly, the government even wheeled out some unbelievable numbnuts of a defence minister who offered up the following quote to describe this great sporting showpiece in which we will again be encouraged to see the Germans as our enemies:

“A no-brainer in terms of an event that is going to reach part of the community that perhaps might not get terribly entrenched into this”

Yep. He really said “entrenched”. Still, we agree with the first three words.

Since we’re on the subject of Willie Rennie, we may as well have a look at the comments he’s made today in response to the Scottish Government’s publication of its “transition” plans in the event of a Yes vote. A clearer, more dispiriting example of the “We cannae dae it, Cap’n!” mentality would be hard to find.

“Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie insisted today that the SNP has “hopelessly underestimated the scale and complexity” of the task ahead.

“They would have to negotiate over 14,000 international treaties, a currency, the division of assets, membership of NATO and the host of international organisations,” he said.

“To say they will bang all this through in just 16 months is absurd. This will give most people in Scotland the shivers and fuel suspicion that the SNP are just making it up as they go along.”

Now, “making it up as they go along” is a pretty strange reaction in the first place to someone publishing a detailed planning document almost TWO YEARS ahead of the time it would be needed. But let’s humour the poor man and glance through his terrifying list of impossible tasks.

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Willie Rennie once called us “deplorable” and “warped”. This is the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader on yesterday’s Sunday Politics Scotland (around 52 mins), defending the Westminster coalition government’s despicable “Bedroom Tax”.

It turns out that contrary to what you might imagine, throwing thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country onto the streets is actually an act of kindness. If you’re struggling a little bit trying to figure out how that works, let Willie explain it:

“Actually it’s difficult for people who are trying to get into work if they’ve got the burden of having to pay for a house they can’t really afford, it makes it much more difficult – they’re going to have to earn more to make work pay. What we’re trying to do here is improve social mobility, so that people can get into work. This prevents them, and that’s why we need to take action.”

Did you get that, readers? People with disabled children who have enough bedrooms for all their kids to sleep in are actually suffering under a terrible burden, which Willie’s millionaire mates in the UK government are going to heroically relieve them of by, er, fining them £80 a month. This, you see, will somehow make it easier for them to find work and improve their social mobility.

How will their having much less money achieve that? Well, because… um… it… er… maybe their kids… uh… nope, it’s gone. We’ve got nothing, readers. If anyone can explain to us how having to keep your disabled child in a cupboard helps you get a job and become upwardly mobile, help us out, eh?

My first contribution to Wings Over Scotland appeared last May and gave an account of my then-current undecided stance on Scottish independence. Savaged mercilessly in the comments as “A bit of a long-winded ‘don’t know'”, in summary we learned three things from it: I’m crap at making decisions, the media coverage of the issue upsets me, and I wasn’t convinced of anything changing for the better after a Yes vote.

Nine months later, only one of those feelings has altered.

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Try as we might, we’re only one small website and we can’t track every last news story in the world. So we’re not sure who died and made Calum Cashley chief of the Internet Police. But whoever it was did the cause of independence a great disservice by not clinging to life for a couple more years.

The Herald’s front-page headline this morning – that is, the most important thing the newspaper considers to be happening in the world today – is “Yes campaigners launch bid to silence cybernats“. We won’t insult our readers’ intelligence by naming its author. It exists solely as a result of the actions of Calum Cashley, and it manages to turn an event of such microscopic non-significance it wouldn’t have raised a gnat’s eyelash into a bilious spew of toxic No-campaign propaganda. Nice work, officer.

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