Wings Over Scotland

From the excellent Part 1 of STV’s new documentary “Road To Referendum” (based on the book by Iain Macwhirter, out this week), Labour PM Harold Wilson and Scottish Secretary Willie Ross punt a rather familiar line four decades before Ed Miliband.

We’re sure there’s nothing at all sinister in the fact that the show was unavailable to most viewers due to an unprecedented cross-media technical failure, which also wiped out the STV news at 6pm and this evening’s Scotland Tonight, incidentally.

Because we all of us do what we can, wherever we are.

Wings Over Scotland undertook a research trip to London yesterday – mainly to check out the Propaganda: Power And Persuasion exhibition at the British Library, which we definitely recommend should you find yourself in the vicinity. Later in the day, though, we took a stroll down Oxford Street, and found ourselves horrified by the state of it.

The UK capital’s great retail showpiece looked like the aftermath of a Luftwaffe bombing raid on a run-down part of Burnley. Much of the south side of the street had been ripped to pieces by ongoing and seemingly endless work for the Crossrail project (sound familiar, Edinburgh residents?), but even where buildings were untouched by the builders there were boarded-up shops, tatty frontages and once-proud units now occupied by scores of scruffy tourist tat shifters.

And if even the great West End has now fallen into that sort of dilapidated, thoroughly depressing condition, despite three decades of all the country’s wealth being greedily sucked down to London, then what of the rest of the country?

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This week’s papers had a story about ‘cybernats’ posting rude messages on social media about Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s opposition to Scottish independence.

For the uninitiated, ‘cybernat’ is the term used in Scottish politics to refer, ostensibly, to slightly mad old-school nationalists who post vile, personalised attacks on their political opponents. Some politicos in Scotland don’t seem to understand, though, that this attack doesn’t really work as a political device as it seeks to apply a pejorative to the SNP when everyone knows it can be applied to some supporters of all political parties. Take a look at the comment pages of any UK newspaper.

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From the one-man gaffe goldmine that is Central Ayrshire Labour MP Brian Donohoe:

We do sympathise, and not just with the unfortunate (but alert) constituent of Mr Donohoe’s who sent us this recent press release. It can’t be easy for poor Brian either, constantly having to remind himself “Commemorate… not celebrate. Commemorate… not celebrate” like a low-rent version of Viz’s immortal Eight Ace.

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When UKIP’s Nigel Farage was recently made rather unwelcome in Edinburgh, a whole slew of Unionist politicians and commentators – most notably Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie – took to the nation’s airwaves and newspaper columns to piously condemn the protestors who peacefully but loudly voiced their disapproval of Farage’s policies. Angry online No supporters, as is their wont, were less measured in their fury at the “suppression” of Farage’s free speech.

Today, the subject of the media’s blanket outrage – there are sizeable stories in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, The Times, Express and many more – is the saintly British Olympic cyclist, Sir Chris Hoy. The unfortunate sportsman has been the subject of what the Mail calls “vile abuse” for some comments in yesterday’s papers in which he ostensibly refused to take sides in the independence debate (but in reality could barely have made his position any clearer).

But another similar (and rather more serious) story, about online abuse directed at a Scottish public figure every bit as well known as Hoy, inexplicably gets only a microscopic fraction of the coverage.

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There’s a story in the Herald this morning that wouldn’t normally come within this site’s remit, dealing as it does with a specific aspect of Scottish Government policy unaffected by independence. It reports a Celtic fan acquitted under the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act after admitting singing a pro-IRA song at a game between the Parkhead club and Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

For reasons we must confess ourselves puzzled by, a great swathe of the Scottish commentariat, on all sides of the constitutional debate, has set itself against the OB(F)A, apparently in the belief that existing laws had done such a good job of eliminating Scotland’s sectarian problem over the last 100 years that there was no need for additional action.

We expect this case will be used as further ammunition for their criticisms of it. But there’s a crucially important line buried three-quarters of the way down the piece.

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A FOREIGN POLICY

Margaret Curran should know the truth
Of engaging brain before opening mooth;
Using the word “foreigner”
Like a profanity
Offends large sections of humanity.

She should know better and be more carin’

Each one of us is a Jock Tamson bairn;

To hear an apology would be divine,
But don’t hold your breath – I won’t hold mine.

The No campaign makes for some unlikely bedfellows.

We’d like you to meet our new favourite patriots.

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It’s not the first time we’ve had to raise this subject. But as the rhetoric ramps up from an increasingly nasty and unhappy No camp, we have to ask again – just what is the Labour Party’s problem with foreigners?

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Johann Lamont used to be an English teacher. We presume she was a conscientious and caring educator. We imagine she’s as horrified and embarrassed by this press release from the train-drivers’ union ASLEF yesterday as we are.

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We’re not in the habit of just reprinting other publications’ stories wholesale here at Wings Over Scotland – we’ve done it maybe four or five times in a year-and-a-half, and two of those were yesterday – but we’ve got a lot on today and there isn’t much we can add to this piece in today’s eminently-worth-purchasing Sunday Post.

Click the image below to read the whole thing.

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