Wings Over Scotland

We have a paid subscription to the Herald, but it's not working at the moment, locking us out from access. In case it's a widespread problem, we feel compelled to reprint this amazing story – which curiously didn't make the website front page today and was buried in the politics section – just to make absolutely sure that nobody misses it.

ENGLISH 'WOULD BOMB OUR AIRPORTS'

Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, in an independent Scotland, could be bombed by an English government if it was threatened by an unfriendly country, a former deputy leader of the UK Conservative Party has warned.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie also warned that SNP policies removing nuclear forces from Scottish bases and reducing Scotland's navy "essentially" to fishery protection vessels could make Scotland a war zone. He said a country with a few fishery protection vessels was "asking to be invaded".

The former Lord Advocate and Solicitor General said he did not see who might have "evil intentions" against England but he had missed "the import of the Balkan crisis and the ramifications of 9/11" and would hesitate "to predict the crises even in the rest of the century".

He foresaw the possibility of an enemy commander ordering the runways at Scottish airports to be cleared because his planes would be landing and "if that were to happen what alternative would England have but to come and bomb the hell out of Glasgow airport and Edinburgh airport".

He suggested one solution would be to base the nuclear fleet, currently based on the Clyde, to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Ponder for a moment, readers, the media coverage if a significant SNP figure had suggested the reverse scenario. Wouldn't that be fun?

As a concept, digital distribution – particularly of videogames – is a wonderful thing. It should, and sometimes does, reduce prices dramatically by cutting out the need for physical manufacture, stock inventory, distribution and retail middleman. (Which in turn can also make niche genres economically viable.)

It can be, and usually is, much more convenient too – there's no need to mess around with noisy, slow-loading discs or worry about getting them scratched or losing them if all your content is right there on an instantly-accessible hard drive.

The only problem with digital is that it cedes control of your software library (and therefore all the money you've invested in it) to business, and business is evil.

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Proceedings in the House of Lords are little seen by the public. While it’s possible for the determined to locate online coverage in the depths of the internet, very little ever makes it to popular broadcast media, and as a result the general public remains mostly ignorant of what goes on there. So we’d very much recommend you find a few minutes to watch some of this. (Annoyingly requires Microsoft Silverlight.)*

It’s the Lords debate on the Scotland Bill, which took place on the 26th of January 2012. It starts at 11:36.55 in the embedded video above (we think the timestamp on the clip represents the time of day the debate took place), and goes on for some hours. Don’t panic, you don’t need to watch all of it – you’ll get the gist from the first 20 minutes or so, by watching the speeches from Lord Forsyth and Lord Foulkes.

There are no SNP representatives in the House of Lords. This is how they talk about us when we’re out of the room.

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This blog doesn't share the eagerness of much of the centre-left to either abolish the House of Lords or make it an elected body. Politicians pandering to the public's most primitive prejudices in pursuit of power are responsible for much of the atrocious state of British democracy, and while we're uneasy with the exercise of mostly-unearned privilege, the Lords were responsible for obstructing some of Tony Blair's worst attacks on civil liberties, and have been the only voice speaking up against the coalition's brutal welfare "reforms". We're not so sure we trust them less than MPs, who regularly stand for election promising one thing then do the precise opposite in government.

There's also nothing exclusive to the Lords about ham-fisted attempts to insert ludicrous amendments into new bills. But it so happens that the most recent example has come from that direction. Conservative hereditary peer the Earl Of Caithness (who owes his position to ancestors over 600 years ago) has put forward a series of extraordinary alterations to the unloved Scotland Bill, currently making its weary way towards a likely rejection by the Scottish Parliament. They're unlikely to be passed, but even the attempt reveals a great deal about the mindset of Scottish Unionists.

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…seems to be the underlying message of a faintly extraordinary blog by Simon Johnson in the Telegraph today. Reacting to the suggestion (which appears to be solely his own) that the SNP will stage the independence referendum in 2014 to take advantage of patriotic events like the Commonwealth Games and the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, Johnson suggests that the plan could backfire.

"2014 is also the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and the 75th anniversary of the Second World War. This would provide the Unionists with ample opportunity to remind the Scottish people how they stood together with the English, Welsh and Northern Irish to defeat Nazism."

It's a fair point, and if by 2014 the Nazi threat is indeed once again looming over Europe, it may well affect the outcome of the referendum. But if the Unionists are already reduced to crossing their fingers for the rise of a new Hitler to stop the SNP, it would seem they're in even more desperate straits than anyone thought.

Come on. It must have been one of you, or someone you know, and it’s time to own up. Because until we deal with this serious issue and reach some sort of closure, Jobs is going to keep taking it out on the rest of us.

There’s simply no other remotely plausible explanation for the staggering hostility – no, make that absolute naked loathing – with which Apple continues to treat the hundreds of millions of customers who’ve made it so rich.

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As the growing horror that is the coalition government unfolds more hideously every day, the British people could easily be forgiven for harbouring a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

The choices presented to them in May 2010 already amounted to little more than three slightly different shades of the same colour. But the moment when even any manufactured pretence at significant difference between the policies offered by the three major parties evaporated – the minute Nick Clegg got behind his Deputy Prime Minister desk – it became impossible to maintain the delusion that Britain remains a democracy in any meaningful sense any more.

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