Wings Over Scotland

In political terms, being an MP is a bit of a poisoned chalice of a job. You ostensibly get elected to represent your constituents, but in reality to represent your party leader. Unless you manage to land yourself a ministerial job you’re basically nothing but a vote on legs, told what to say and ordered through the division lobby by party whips like a ewe in a sheepdog trial, under the constant threat of being overlooked for plum spots on committees or even deselected.

Now don’t worry, readers. Wings Over Scotland isn’t going soft. We have precious little sympathy to spare for career politicians troughing for all they’re worth on a £65,000 salary typically inflated to somewhere comfortably over £100,000 by allowances and perks, and accompanied by incredibly generous redundancy payments and pensions the likes of which us poor saps can only dream of.

But still, it’s no job for anyone with any dignity or self-respect. MPs are loathed by the public more than almost any other profession (other than bankers, with whom most people think they rhyme), very often justifiably so, and most will achieve nothing in their lives other than self-enrichment. It’s a soul-destroying way to get yourself a couple of nice houses at the taxpayer’s expense.

There’s a much less corrosive way to be an MP, though.

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For a long time if felt like a dirty secret. It’s how we’ve been conditioned. It was simply something that you just didn’t speak about, because most people around you would look down on you if they knew.

Those feelings are something that many who believe in an independent Scotland have encountered at some point in our lives. Up until recently I very much felt that way, and to this day I’m still wary of mentioning my Scottish independence yearning in some circles. But times are changing.

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Our story of this morning raised an interesting issue in the comments, namely whether sites like this one are actually helping to prop up the Scottish mainstream media by linking to its articles and thereby generating web traffic, page rankings and money for what is too often a toxic and dishonest propaganda tool for the Union.

For some time, readers have occasionally pointed this out to us and urged us not to help them, so that their deaths might be hastened. But here’s the conflict: we have no desire to destroy Scottish journalism, only to keep it honest.

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One of the main weapons in the arsenal of the No campaign is to induce fear in the public over their pensions. It’s a strategy based on the generally inadequate knowledge that most of us have over our pensions, so the “Better Together” coalition has been handing out flyers proclaiming that “the pensions of 1 million Scots are guaranteed by remaining in the UK” – the implication being that outside of the UK they wouldn’t be.

But since we can generally assume the contents of their leaflets to be somewhat economical with the truth, what would happen to our pensions after independence?

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We must admit, the “Red Paper Collective” – dragged up for a quote today by the Herald’s Magnus Gardham – was a new entity on us. A quick Google reveals that they seem to be a Labour Party offshoot, a fact Gardham unaccountably neglected to mention in his piece describing them merely as “trade union activists”.

So we perhaps shouldn’t waste too much time paying attention to their critical views about “Yes To A Just Scotland”, the document released by the official Yes campaign today. But one line does rather beg to be highlighted for the contempt in which the No campaign evidently holds the people of Scotland.

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Last year (24 June 2012, to be precise):

“Homeowners could face a £1 billion rise in mortgage payments in an independent Scotland, Treasury axeman Danny Alexander has warned.

The world’s leading credit rating agencies earlier this year warned Scotland would not be guaranteed the UK’s AAA borrowing status.”

This year:

“The UK has lost its top AAA credit rating for the first time since 1978 on expectations that growth will ‘remain sluggish over the next few years’.

The ratings agency Moody’s became the first to cut the UK from its highest rating, to Aa1. Moody’s said that the government’s debt reduction programme faced significant ‘challenges’ ahead.”

Nice to know we didn’t have to wait for independence, eh?

Today’s press is full of reports on the Glasgow University independence referendum, in which the vote went 62-38 against on a turnout variously reported as 11%, 12% and 13%. (To our considerable surprise, this dismal level of interest was in fact regarded as a triumph, and vastly above the usual amount of engagement with student politics.)

Fewer than 2,600 people voted – despite the ballot being held somewhere students had to go anyway – so the results are barely as authoritative as a typical opinion poll. They do suggest a couple of reasonably interesting things, though.

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This sort of thing does seem to be happening with disturbing frequency at the august offices of the Scotsman these days. Yesterday’s paper ran a story under the stark headline “EU budget cuts ‘will favour the English’, says SNP”.

[EDIT: Also spun into a truly vile column by Michael Kelly today.]

You’ve been playing this game a while now, readers. See if you can guess which words from the headline don’t actually appear anywhere in the story.

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This guy’s on your team. Congratulations on that.

(We’re particularly impressed by the attack on Nicola Sturgeon, just days after a poll found her to be the most popular politician in Scotland, and probably Britain. Genius.)

At the last Scottish Parliament election, UKIP secured 0.52% of the vote, a little over half the share achieved by the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party. We’re not sure why the press doesn’t give their leader, whoever it is, more front covers.

This is a letter sent to the Scotsman this week, as yet unpublished by the newspaper, in response to this. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

SIR – I have read David Maddox’s article on Scotland and Catalonia (19th February 2013). As a Catalan that has lived and worked in Scotland for many years and also as a former Representative of the Government of Catalonia to the UK, I was surprised by the contents of the article.

The relations between Scotland and Catalonia have traditionally been excellent and since devolution they have become even better. How would you otherwise explain the lessons learnt from the Catalan political system when designing the devolution settlement for Scotland?; or the Scottish and Catalan governments Protocol of Cooperation signed in 2002?; or the symbolism associated with the fact that the Scottish Parliament was built by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles?; or even the extremely successful visit of the First Minister Salmond to Catalonia just a few years ago? These are powerful statements of friendship between two countries.

Catalans, and the rest of the world, know that Scotland is at the most important crossroads of the last 300 years. Now it is time for Scots to decide the future of its nation. We wish Scotland and its people well and we are very pleased to see that Scotland’s future is in the best possible hands.

Xavier Solano i Bello
Tiltman Place
London

The most interestingly consistent trend of recent opinion polls has been a significant movement away from the No vote to the Don’t Know camp. Almost every one conducted in the last few months has shown the proportion of the population intending to vote against independence dropping below 50%, but the Yes campaign has only picked up a minority, with the rest now firmly undecided.

The significance of this shift shouldn’t be underestimated. Once someone’s opinion starts to change, more often than not it tends to keep moving in the same direction, unless there’s a fundamental alteration in the reasons that caused it to start. And with the anti-independence side showing no signs of abandoning their campaign of relentless negativity, that seems unlikely.

However, it also shouldn’t be OVER-estimated. A crucial section of the populace has signified its willingness to be persuaded, but if it’s to turn the headline figures around YesScotland still has to finish the job. In order to understand how that might be achieved, we need to examine the fundamental tenets of Unionism.

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We’ve been (rather childishly, we admit) suggesting that “deputy” Anas Sarwar was Scottish Labour’s real leader for longer than we care to remember now. It was nice of the Daily Record to finally confirm it for us today, though.