Wings Over Scotland

Forgive us another rummage around in our poll data, but we didn’t do a lot of study into gender differences in our first wave of analysis, and we were struck by something this morning as we idly browsed through the question about what Scots were scared of.

Along with the fact that women were almost twice as likely – 38% to 22% – to be undecided about their referendum vote* as men (and indeed about most other votes), it was one of the areas where the differences between the sexes were most stark.

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Readers who haven’t recently suffered a blow to the head will probably recall that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was quoted in the Scotsman last week (in a story which WAS considered worthy of coverage), bitterly complaining that the Yes campaign had used the phrase “best of both worlds”, which for some reason he appeared to believe was his exclusive possession.

The fine gentleman above was pictured on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street on Saturday. He also appears to be toting some borrowed property. Can you spot it?

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Viewers who are still awake after all today’s excitement will doubtless recall an article from this morning in which we reported the fact that hapless “Better Together” director Blair McDougall had issued an extraordinary petted-lip complaint about the Yes camp daring to use the phrase “best of both worlds”, as if it was copyrighted.

(The even more remarkable news being that the Scotsman considered this a story.)

Still, it’s a fair point, right? You shouldn’t just pinch stuff from people, should you?

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One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

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If you hate listening to audio or watching video (as opposed to reading the printed word) as much as we do, or if you’re just at work and can’t, here’s a complete transcript – courtesy of one of our splendid readers – of this morning’s BBC Breakfast appearance from UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

Once again, the very last line of the transcript is the killer.

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You might want to wrap some bandaging around your jaw before listening to this BBC News interview with UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom this morning, to keep it off the floor.

It gets more and more mindboggling as it goes on. But it’s not the chilling thing.

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A reader posted this clip in a comment last night and we’ve already tweeted it earlier this morning, but it really deserves to be seen as widely as possible.

(If you’re in a hurry, you can skip straight to 1m 50s.)

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The internet’s been enjoying itself since last night knocking up satirical versions of The Sun’s wraparound cover today. For no immediately apparent reason (except perhaps that it’s a slow time for news) the paper has suddenly decided to give a “State Of The Union”-type address explicitly setting out its beliefs on a variety of subjects.

We thought that it might pass a few idle moments to compare the UK and Scottish editions, and see how closely those beliefs matched up on either side of the border.

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Wings Over Scotland went to London last weekend, for no particular reason other than a change of scenery. After a trip to the faux-bohemian Camden Market – in which about six different stalls are now repeated over and over in a sad, gentrified mockery of its previous more anarchic life, yet while still maintaining much of the vibrant feel – we set off in no particular direction and found ourselves in Trafalgar Square.

Despite having been to the capital dozens of times, I’d never visited the home of Nelson’s Column, which is far bigger in real life than it looks in pictures, managing to dominate what is a very large plaza with no shortage of other imposing monuments and decorations. (Including the vast National Gallery and, at the moment, an incongruous enormous bright blue cockerel.)

Suitably inspired, we elected to take a stroll to the Embankment, past the London Eye, and from there on a walking tour of the heart of the British establishment. Searching for exploitable weaknesses, obviously.

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For those of you with Spotify, click the image to open.

(Full 30-track playlist here. It’s an open collaborative one so feel free to add your own suggestions, or to make a YouTube version for those without the app.)

From a heavily-spun Huffington Post piece on Scotland’s relationship with the monarchy, in which Dennis Canavan expressing a personal opinion when asked a question becomes an “outburst”. You know the sort of thing. (The story was also reported in the Telegraph as “Yes camp in disarray”, before a hasty rewrite.)

It’s an interesting definition of “overwhelming majority”, we’ll grant you. But it might explain why the No campaign apparently thinks it has the referendum won already.

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Our old pal Tom Harris fits awfully comfortably into the pages of the Daily Telegraph for a Labour MP representing a poverty-blighted Glasgow seat. But there’s something a bit odd about the ugly little piece on immigration he penned for the paper this week.

See if you can spot it.

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