Wings Over Scotland

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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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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Well, this is the month of the Mad March Hare, we suppose.

First we had Bernard Ponsonby telling us that the referendum was a choice between independence and a completely imaginary “more powers” option. Next up was Hamish Macdonell in the Spectator, oddly hallucinating that David Cameron had announced “devo max” when in fact he’d announced devo nothing at all.

At the weekend (and, we suspect, all this week) there were journalists insisting that Johann Lamont was offering Scots major advances devolution when in fact she was essentially offering the 2009 Calman Commission with a new ribbon tied on it.

But the winner is surely David Torrance in today’s Herald.

“This was the first Scottish Conservative gathering I can remember in quite a while where there were visible signs of political life. Ms Davidson made the best conference speech of her leadership, actually connecting with her audience, while usefully the venue, Edinburgh’s shiny EICC, didn’t conform to type by being dusty and half-empty.”

Our emphasis. But, um…

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So we’re just letting this one slide, are we?

“[David Mundell], who next year will mark 10 years as the only Tory MP in Scotland, says, if there is a Yes vote, the First Minister’s declaration of Independence Day will have no legal status and be merely an aspiration.”

The Edinburgh Agreement seems increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.

We already know that Scottish Labour consider any government of Scotland that isn’t themselves to be a “dictatorship”. So in context this comment from South Scotland list MSP Graeme Pearson in the Holyrood chamber yesterday is actually quite restrained:

“The Police Service is insufficiently accountable and it needs to be subject to proper governance, because if it is not properly governed, there is a danger that it will become merely an army of occupation that is maintained at public expense.”

It’s no accident that Labour so regularly call the democratically-elected SNP “fascists” and compare Alex Salmond to a whole cornucopia of murderous genocidal dictators. But we suppose that regarding the Nats as an invading foreign army, deploying Police Scotland as occupying troops, makes a bit more sense of both Labour’s dogged defence of the UK, and their oft-expressed distaste for foreigners.

We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.

Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.

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So we just got this a few minutes ago (click pic to enlarge):

And now we’re really starting to think a licence-fee avoidance campaign is a good idea.

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On the eve of Wings Over Scotland’s 2000th post, we thought we’d celebrate.

Because today we learned something strange.

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Because if you don’t, your brain sort of refuses to acknowledge that certain things happened, and won’t let you dwell on them lest you lose your grip on reality.

So when we watched Douglas Alexander interviewed on Sunday Politics Scotland today, and heard an answer so bizarre and so spectacularly, flagrantly unrelated to the question he was asked that we briefly thought there might have been a slow-acting hallucinogenic in the cinnamon-and-vanilla cider we were drinking last night, we figured we better get it down in print so we could study it properly and check our sanity.

(Click the image to watch and listen for yourselves.) See what you think.

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When someone sent us a collection of tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Clutha tragedy late last year, we decided not to use them. It wasn’t for any great moral reason – we’ve previously highlighted despicable No-camp scumbags making political capital out of the deaths of innocent people – but we were just too sickened and sad (as most Scots were) to waste a moment’s thought on such human dregs.

As the Daily Mail ploughs on with its crusade against “vile cybernats”, though, it seemed worth pointing out for the record just what sort of a place the internet really is, and how pathetic its catalogue of mild swearwords and distaste is in that context.

Stop reading now if you’re easily upset.

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The Daily Mail is proving an even more consistent source of comedy than usual of late, nowhere more so than its superb “Cybernat Watch” column (which we were delighted to find ourselves in this morning, on only its second day). Today the collection of partial, out-of-context quotes from random tweets was nestled into a bizarre piece about Labour’s shadow something, Jim Murphy.

As with most articles from the Mail’s Scottish edition it isn’t available online, but we’ve attached the text below so you can digest the full disturbing madness.

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Welcome to another glorious new dawn in the Union.

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