Wings Over Scotland

An alert reader points out a story in today’s edition of the once-popular regional periodical. See if you can pick out the curious inconsistency.

Headline: “Concern at decline in PE teacher numbers under SNP”

Third sentence: “However, schools have made up the shortfall by appointing additional PE teachers on temporary contracts – most of them part-time – which has led to an overall increase.”

We’ve emphasised some of the words as a clue. Did you get it?

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Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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It’s funny how often we get accused of being slavish SNP devotees and “cybernats” here at Wings Over Scotland. In reality, while I can’t speak for the other contributors, I’ve voted Liberal Democrat at every election for the past 21 years. (Although I never will again, after the series of betrayals in 2010 and beyond.) Just thought I’d mention it.

The Unionists have deployed a trestle table and some bizarrely faded plastic Union Jacks. We fear the game is up for nationalism from this day forward.

If this is the “unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” described in the Herald this week, we’re fairly quivering about the actual war. The above gathering of the No camp features former Secretary Of State for Scotland and Minister for Europe Jim Murphy MP, along with what look like failed Scottish Labour leadership candidate Ken Macintosh MSP and failed Scottish Conservative leadership candidate Jackson Carlaw MSP (though we can’t be 100% certain from the picture).

If that’s the sort of campaigning juggernaut “Better Together” can rustle up for such a collection of big hitters, goodness knows what ordinary footsoldiers are having to work with. We hope and trust that alert cybernats everywhere in Scotland will be gathering pictorial evidence of this mighty strategic onslaught, in order that we might collect it together for another of our always-popular photo galleries.

Our Twitter address is @WingsScotland. Keep us in the loop, readers.

As keen readers will know, this blog is often to be found lamenting the disappointing standards upheld by the Scottish media. We’re especially dismayed when fully-staffed professional newspapers fail to catch spelling errors and typos, such as the one that crept into Brian Monteith’s latest batshit-mental ponderings for the Scotsman.

While bafflingly castigating Alex Salmond for failing to have the referendum at a time advantageous to the Unionist parties, Conservative pundit and former MSP Mr Monteith has inexplicably left an “L” out of one of the words in this sentence:

“Then can we all move on and get back to the real world of sorting out the nation’s problems like having jobs for our youth and care facilities for our elderly”

Sloppily, none of the Scotsman’s subs caught the error. Can you help them, readers?

Well now, that rascal Brer Fox hated Brer Rabbit, on account of he was always cutting capers and bossing everyone around. So Brer Fox decided to capture and kill Brer Rabbit if it was the last thing he ever did! He thought and he thought until he came up with a plan. He would make a tar baby! Brer Fox went and got some tar and he mixed it with some turpentine and he sculpted it into the figure of a cute little baby. Then he stuck a hat on the Tar Baby and sat her in the middle of the road.

Brer Fox hid himself in the bushes near the road and he waited and waited for Brer Rabbit to come along. At long last, he heard someone whistling and chuckling to himself, and he knew that Brer Rabbit was coming up over the hill. As he reached the top, Brer Rabbit spotted the cute little Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was surprised. He stopped and stared at this strange creature. He had never seen anything like it before!

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We note with micro-interest that the Unionist parties have today announced their preferred question for the independence referendum – a policy they all strenuously opposed at the election, in which they were overwhelmingly defeated. And unusually for this blog, as a result we find ourselves having something in common with the “No” camp, because nobody gives a toss what we think the question should be either.

Bearing that in mind, we invite readers to suggest their own proposed question. We’ll gather up all the best ones at the end of the day and send them to the Electoral Commission, in case they’d like to scrutinise them.

Courtesy of the sadly-deceased CalMerc, here’s an example to get you started.

In the last 24 hours we’ve now asked at least half-a-dozen different people, of various party loyalties and none, if they can explain exactly what crime Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie apparently considers Martin Sime of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations to be guilty of. Curiously, every time we’ve asked the question the conversation has immediately gone dead and stayed that way.

So far as we’ve been able to establish, an SNP adviser called Alex Bell sent Mr Sime an unsolicited email bringing to his attention a poll that showed a large majority of trade union members to be in favour of a second question in the independence referendum, which would provide the option of more powers for the Scottish Parliament while remaining in the Union.

The core question, then, seems to be whether this is an inappropriate position for SCVO to be taking, and therefore whether Mr Sime would be acting inappropriately in receiving such an email (leaving aside for a moment the issue of how he’d be supposed to have avoided receiving it).

To answer that question, first we need to consult the SCVO’s mission statement, which states the organisation’s purpose as “To support people to take voluntary action to help themselves and others, and to bring about social change”.

That’s perhaps a little vague, so instead let’s examine the submission the Council sent to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the subject of the independence referendum and specifically the number of questions therein, which it published in May of this year.

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We live, perhaps more than at any time in history, in a world characterised by open lies. Only this week, the coalition government was caught red-handed understating the number of school playing-field closures under its administration by 50%. A punk band in Russia singing a protest song about the President’s attacks on human rights are accused of religious hatred, in a show trial every bit as transparently corrupt as anything Stalin or Hitler would have ordered.

Meanwhile in the West, a man dedicated to exposing truth and criminal activities is wanted by the USA to put on trial for espionage. Democratically elected politicians in the “home of the free” call for him to be executed or extra-judicially assassinated as a terrorist. Conversely, the same man portrays as political persecution attempts to have him extradited to another country to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

(We’re surprised that the UK authorities don’t solve the problem at a stroke by simply getting Kenny Farquharson of the Scotsman to determine whether Assange is guilty or innocent while he’s still in the Ecuadorian embassy. After all, Kenny is apparently able to judge these things without all the tedious and time-consuming business of presenting evidence, hearing a defence and establishing or corroborating facts. So long as the accused doesn’t have access to highly-paid lawyers, of course.)

Here in Scotland things are no different. In the last week alone, two senior Unionist politicians have perpetrated enormous and deliberate lies cynically calculated to poison and undermine discourse. Ian Davidson and Willie Rennie have made inflammatory statements no intelligent human being could possibly believe to be true (we’ll pass tactfully over the issue over whether such a definition in fact includes either man), and angrily reasserted them when challenged.

There is only one purpose for actions like these. They are knowingly designed to create an intimidatory atmosphere where journalists are cowed into following the agenda desired by the culprits, and deflected from areas that said culprits don’t wish reported on. The wider intent is to control the media by recalibrating the centre ground of “impartiality”, and thereby achieve a strategic shift of coverage in their favour.

Here’s how it works.

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The Scottish media is predictably excited about Gordon Brown’s latest intervention in the independence debate. Giving a speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Kirkcaldy MP who’s barely turned up in Parliament to represent his constituents in the two-and-a-quarter years since being deposed as Prime Minister abandoned any pretence at a positive case for the Union and presented a doom-laden picture of a future Scotland slashing pensions, welfare and defence while increasing taxes.

The No camp’s united policy on the Scottish constitution, in so far as one can be ascertained at all, is that the Scottish people should reject independence and then rely on Westminster to give Holyrood more powers, though the campaign steadfastly resists any clarification on what those powers might be.

But the remarkable and eye-opening thing about the former PM’s dire vision regarding pensions, welfare, defence and taxation was that it professed – despite the Scotsman’s clumsily inaccurate headline and confused and contradictory text – to describe a future Scotland not under independence, but so-called “devo-max”.

So if we take Brown as an authoritative spokesman on Scottish Labour policy – and it seems eminently reasonable to do so – we can safely assume that the only other party with even a chance of power in either Holyrood or Westminster has no intention of devolving anything substantial to Scotland any time soon. The petty tinkering of the Calman Commission/Scotland Act does indeed appear to be the limit of devolutionary ambition. And if you think about it, it’s hard to see how it could be any other way.

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We’ve only ever been ashamed to be Scottish once in our lives – when Craig Levein sent out our football team in a 4-6-0 formation in Prague. But there are occasionally other times when our fellow countrymen can be a source of a certain degree of embarrassment, and one of them was highlighted in, of all places, the local newspaper of the small English market town of Bourne this week.

Bourne is located in the East Midlands, a few miles north of Peterborough, and quite why its local paper is reporting Scottish independence news is a mystery to us, but Monday’s edition of The Local carried a story titled “Games bolster independence support”. It was based on a survey reported in the weekend’s Sunday Times, but picked up on a detail that none of the Scottish media chose to notice.

The survey put support for independence at 35%, just 9% behind the Union on 44%. But curiously, of the same respondents, 58% wanted Scotland to have its own Olympic team, with only half as many – 29% – wanting Scottish athletes to continue to compete under the Team GB banner at future Games.

That’s a whopping 23% of people who want Scotland to have the trappings of a proper nation, but aren’t prepared to accept the responsibilities. Almost a quarter of the population who want to act like a real country, but lack the courage to actually make it happen, who want a wee pretendy Olympic team to go with their wee pretendy Parliament that doesn’t get to make the really important decisions.

We don’t think it’s very productive to insult Scots whose political views differ from ours, so we don’t. You’ll scour this site in vain for any attacks on the Scottish people for voting Labour or being against independence. But when we see a huge chunk of the nation who clearly DO want independence, but are just too feart to actually vote for it, it’s hard not to wince a little at your own people’s lack of courage.

In 2014 Scottish voters will have to decide once and for all whether they’re Arthur or Martha, and they can’t have it both ways. Voting “No” in the belief that Westminster will then just voluntarily hand over a bunch of meaningful extra powers out of the sheer goodness of its heart, at exactly the point when we’d have given up all our bargaining chips, is naive bordering on outright stupid.

(Particularly given that the chances are it would be handing those powers to the SNP, which currently sits even further ahead in the polls than it did in May 2011 and whose support encompasses far more than just the people who back independence.)

Scots can’t have their cake and eat it, because – to borrow a highly apt phrase from our previous life – the cake is a lie. We hope they realise that before it’s too late.

We noticed the image below doing the rounds on Twitter this morning, and were mildly surprised to trace it back to the official “Better Together” campaign account. Alert readers will already have noticed us satirically characterising it (in a tweet) as a claim that all but one of Scotland’s medal-winners at London 2012 were actually English, but in fact it’s something a little bit stranger than that.

Because what the image actually says is “Hey, Scotch people! Under successive UK governments you’ve suffered such chronic underinvestment in your sporting facilities that every talented athlete in Scotland has had to travel hundreds of miles from their home, leaving their families and friends behind, in order to get adequate training!”

We’re not sure that’s quite the red-hot selling point for the Union they think it is.