Wings Over Scotland

This is the referendum question the Scottish Government wanted:

“Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? YES/NO”

This is the referendum question the Unionist parties wanted:

“Voters should be presented with a statement on the ballot paper: ‘Scotland should become an independent state’, and asked to put an ‘X’ against ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’.”

This, we’re told today, is what the referendum question will be:

“Should Scotland be an independent country? YES/NO”

Yep, sounds like another “comprehensive defeat” for the SNP all right.

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Dear Mr Benn,

I was in Glasgow Concert Hall on Saturday for your interview, and the preview of the film about your life. And what a life! You are inspirational to many, as the crowd made clear. It’s easy to see why. You talk passionately of hope, of belief in a better future, of anger at injustice. Of engagement and democracy.

You recognise, too, that New Labour became right-wing, almost a second Tory party. You must understand how this played in Scotland.

It’s for these reasons I was depressed and perplexed by your answer to the question on Scottish independence. The question was a good one: would an independent Scotland be more socialist? It’s a question many in the independence movement grapple with. Can we cast off Westminster’s neoliberalism, corruption and corporate greed? There is no answer; no one knows.

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Readers may recall that a few days ago we highlighted a rather bizarre confusion on the part of the anti-independence movement, which is more commonly known as “Better Whenever” or something like that. Faced with a poll in which 11% of respondents wished to completely abolish the Scottish Parliament and end the devolution experiment, the No campaign decided that such people were in fact “supporters of devolution” and tailored their promotional materials accordingly.

We think we may have solved this baffling puzzle, however, and the key was in a Twitter message posted earlier today by the campaign’s director Blair McDougall.

Unaccountably, Mr McDougall appeared to be under the impression than the SNP had “opposed” devolution in the 1990s. (And presumbly most pertinently around the time of the 1997 referendum on the subject.) That didn’t quite seem to square with our, in fairness, increasingly-fallible memory of the period, so we did a little research.

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If you raise the slightest voice of dissent to the increasing fetishisation of the military in the UK these days, you risk drawing down a barrage of foul-mouthed ire on your head from furious British nationalists, inexplicably enraged at the expression of the desire not to send the sons, daughters, friends, fathers and mothers of Scotland off to die pointlessly in foreign countries where we have no legitimate business.

So it was nice to have our comments about the crass, jingoistic “commemoration” of last year’s Remembrance Day circus at Ibrox echoed this week by the joint chiefs of Scotland’s armed forces, who have ordered that the grotesque, “inappropriate” scenes will not be repeated in future. We hope the club’s fans, and others of the same mindset, will pay more attention when rebuked by such impeccable authorities than they ever would to the objections of evil traitorous cybernats like us.

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We love when people send us amusing things. Here’s a beauty, featuring fun-loving “Better Together” campaign chief (and former “director of David Miliband’s shadow activist base”, which sounds very exciting) Blair McDougall, speaking way back on the 24th of March 2011 – just six action-packed weeks before the Holyrood election:

“Deprived of government power after our longest period in office, there is something almost therapeutic about finding new ways to make change happen. Unless you are lucky enough to be a Welsh minister, Labour council leader or (after May’s elections) a Scottish Labour minister, you are unlikely to wield executive power any time soon.”

This week, Mr McDougall’s been making similar proclamations about the result of the independence referendum, except rather further out from the event. We hope he’s as good at predicting (and as baselessly complacent) now as he was two years ago, and every bit as successful in achieving his aims.

When I wrote previously about how Scotland’s export business does not depend on the UK (as had been claimed by Alistair Darling at last year’s Mackintosh Memorial Lecture), one of the questions I was asked was what export business Scotland has.

On Wednesday, in a piece lurking at the bottom of Scottish news section, the BBC reported a £1.6bn rise in Scottish exports. The Global Connections Survey (GCS) – full report here – showed that exports were up to record highs both to the rest of the UK and to the rest of the world. Scotland’s exports to the rUK showed a value of £45.5 billion, and to the rest of the world they rose by the headlined £1.6bn, up to £23.9bn.

It’s worth noting that none of these statistics include oil (see page 2 of the report), despite the mention of “refined petroleum” below – we’ll deal with that another day.

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We owe SNP communications officer Erik Geddes an indirect hat-tip for this one, as a link he posted to something else on Twitter led us to discover this superb piece from the Herald archives. It’s from the 28th of February 1979, the day before the first referendum on Scottish devolution – the one which resulted in a Yes vote, but which was rejected on the grounds of a rigged amendment by a Scottish Labour MP, delaying the return of a Scottish parliament for 20 years.

It’s absolutely startling to read the “No” responses and see just how indistinguishable most of the dire warnings about the consequences of an “Assembly” are from the arguments against independence we hear now, and to also note how few of them (in fact, none) came true when devolution finally arrived.

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Poor old “Better Together”. We already knew they had some difficulty with basic counting, but today it seems their reading isn’t up to much either. Desperate to deflect attention from the hideous hole they’ve dug themselves into over Europe, they’ve seized on the latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing (depending how you spin it) almost three-quarters of Scots in favour of devolution rather than independence.

There’s only one problem: the cited source for those figures doesn’t say that at all.

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There are some questions that are guaranteed to bring a sudden end to any internet discussion. (In real life it’s harder for people to just vanish into thin air.) One always effective on Labour supporters, for example, is the classic “Would you rather live in an independent Scotland governed by Labour or one in the UK governed by the Tories?”

Of course, more strictly speaking that’s actually a near-certain way to ask someone to choose between Option A and Option B and every time get the answer “Non-existent Option C”. Other questions, though, are sure to solicit no response at all.

Last year, when occasionally debating with Rangers supporters about whether The Rangers International PLC (or whatever it’s called today) was a new club or not, I must have asked this one at least 60 or 70 times of 60 or 70 different people: “If they’re the same club they always were, why are they in SFL 3? They were neither relegated on the field nor demoted as a punishment, so why aren’t they still in the SPL?”

I’ve as yet never had a single response – even a bad one – to that, just instant and complete radio silence or, at the best, an abrupt change of subject. And recently I’ve discovered there’s a holy water for the Tory type of vampire too.

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Alert readers might have noticed that this morning we tweeted a link to a post on the Facebook page of Labour For Independence. It was a retort to a sneering claim from Anas Sarwar that the group had “one or a maximum of two Labour members” and was in fact a front for the SNP, and it responded by printing a list of 13 named Labour Party members who were active in the group. One of them stood out a little.

Now, we have absolutely no idea if that Alex Foulkes is the same Alex Foulkes who’s the son of arch-Unionist peer and Nat-basher Lord George Foulkes. We’re sure there are lots of people called Alex Foulkes in the Scottish Labour Party. But given that Lady Judy Steel (the excellent wife of Sir David, another prominent No voice) came out for independence a while ago – prompting a slightly misjudged joke from Murdo Fraser last week – it’d be a moderately amusing development if it was.

After all, if the leading lights of the No campaign can’t even convince the closest members of their own family to back the UK, how the heavens are they going to be able to sell the ailing Union to the rest of Scotland?

Bless ’em, they’re getting closer. After some nagging, the Herald has now finally changed the story about jobs at Faslane that it printed a correction for earlier this week. And credit to them, the new version is a good 5% less wrong than the original.

Rather more distressingly, though, the newly-edited story still doesn’t match up even to the Herald’s own correction, never mind any kind of reality.

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We hope you’re just drunk, Ian. Honestly we do.

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