Wings Over Scotland

It’s a Bank Holiday and frankly there’s absolutely bugger-all of any interest in the news today, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. I’ve only used the personal pronoun for a couple of Wings articles out of over 2,300 in the site’s two and a half years of existence, because the independence debate isn’t about me. But a curious piece in today’s Herald by David Torrance merits such a response.

If you don’t see what it’s got to do with that video*, bear with me.

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We’ve quite frequently highlighted the ugly, irresponsible tone of the No campaign’s – and especially Labour’s – comments about “foreigners” in the independence debate. And the reason we do is because that sort of language feeds attitudes like these.

There is, sadly, more where that came from.

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I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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We’re off to watch the Scottish Cup semi-final now, so to keep you all entertained for the next couple of hours here’s a little something we put together at the request of columnist and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, and for anyone who was listening to Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” this morning.

Hopefully we won’t need it ourselves by 3.30pm. #COYR

If it’s Wednesday, Labour must have changed their position on their future-devolution proposals again. Following our latest highlighting of the glaring contradictions in the shambolic “Devo Nano” plans, responses have started arriving to your letters.

If you’ve been listening closely, you’ll have heard that the position on whether the Scottish Parliament would be able to reduce taxes below the UK level has see-sawed from “No you can’t” (Johann Lamont MSP, 18 March) to “Yes you can” (Richard Baker MSP, 28 March) and back to “No you can’t” again (Tom Clarke MP, 4 April).

Well, guess what?

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Earlier today we highlighted two pieces of disgraceful, mendacious smearing by The Scotsman, in conjunction with an “anonymous” Labour MP. The articles coincided with a wider campaign of demonisation across most of the Scottish and UK media against supporters of independence, backed up by elected Labour representatives on social media in what might easily be seen as a co-ordinated attack.

The tweets above are from the account of semi-literate Labour councillor for East Kilbride, James Docherty. They follow a week in which the Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray described the placing of one or more small “Yes 2014” stickers on his constituency office windows as an “out of control” escalation of intimidation and Alistair Darling accused some people objecting to a businessman sending a document full of scaremongering lies to 500 employees of his company as “shaming Scotland”.

These hysterical smears would be laughable were it not for the consequences they may yet bring about. We highlight some of those consequences below.

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Just for a change, a wee bit of culture for a Sunday evening.

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As far as we’re aware, “the largest arts festival in Europe” (indeed, the largest arts festival anywhere in the world) is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Does anyone remember Ian Murray MP being in charge of it?

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This is the Guardian’s elaborate, deliberately-absurd April Fool story:

Ha ha! Good one!

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The last 40 years of UK politics accurately summarised in 30 seconds.

(From episode 3 of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, still on iPlayer at time of writing.)

While we wait for the full detail of what look like being even more watered-down and insipid “Devo Lite” proposals from Labour than we were expecting, we suppose we might as well spend a minute on last night’s big “Better Together” announcement that Eddie Izzard was going to hold a benefit gig for the No campaign, putting the Union on a par with starving Ethiopians and earthquake victims.

Einstein is claimed to have said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (and readers hopefully already know our views on Quote Nazis), so we found a line attributed to Izzard in the press release particularly striking.

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Here’s a “Better Together” spokesman on Alex Salmond’s New Statesman lecture:

“Alex Salmond seems to have ditched his plan to be best pals with the rest of the UK and has instead decided to tell the English, Welsh and Northern Irish people how rubbish they are.”

We were there. Want to know what he actually said about England?

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