Wings Over Scotland

The Daily Telegraph just released a video called “100 Reasons Why Brexit Was A Good Thing”. It listed them to a soundtrack of “Jerusalem”, the same song that closed the Labour Party conference earlier this week with its stirring ode to just one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.

100 reasons why #Brexit was a good thing pic.twitter.com/s2gyYSDUzJ

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 30, 2016

We’ve saved a few of the highlights below, just in case the Telegraph should delete the video in a fit of sanity. We’ve also added one fake one. See if you can spot it.

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Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:

It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?

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The Sunday Times has a new Panelbase poll out today, and it borrows a question that was first asked by this website (via the same pollster) 14 months ago. These were the results this month:

They broadly show little change from when we asked last year (for the five options the changes are +1, 0, -3, +8 and -5), suggesting that the main practical upshot of the EU referendum campaign was to halve the number of Don’t Knows, which was achieved by shifting almost all of them straight onto the Leave side with the Remain camp’s abysmal recreation of Better Together’s “Project Fear”.

Nevertheless, the chart is a fascinating and pertinent one. Because while there’s only one of the four non-DK groups in the list who definitely can’t get what they want, there’s another one whose decision will be a lot harder than Yes supporters would like.

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We originally wrote this article in March, in response to the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (better known as GERS) figures for 2014-15. We’ve updated it to take account of events since that time, of which there’s been one rather major one.

Today saw the publication (just five months after the 2014-15 GERS) of the 2015-16 stats, which are again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media, as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures – showing an essentially unchanged “deficit” despite an almost £2bn fall in oil revenue – destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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If there haven’t been as many posts on this site as people might expect at a time of such incredible political turmoil, it’s because Wings isn’t at heart a commentary blog. We don’t do a lot of flat-out opinion pieces, tending to concern ourselves more with measurable, empirical facts, and since nobody knows anything about anything at the moment, we haven’t had all that much useful to say.

But the closest thing there is right now to a certainty is that sometime quite soon, Unionist politicians in Scotland are going to have to grow up and deal with this:

And their problem is that there’s no possible way to.

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The Scotsman reports a “blow” to Nicola Sturgeon this morning:

“The UK’s new Chancellor has said Scotland should not have a different relationship with Europe than the rest of the UK.

Philip Hammond, who replaced George Osborne as new Prime Minister Theresa May appointed her Cabinet, said the vote to leave the European Union was a “democratic decision” made by the United Kingdom as a whole, which would now be implemented.

It marks a blow for First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has been consistently making a case for Scotland to retain its links with Europe after the majority of voters north of the border opted for Remain.”

So the official Westminster line is that Scotland will HAVE to become independent if it wants to remain in the EU. We’re sure the FM will be absolutely gutted to hear that.

If your only source of news was the mainstream media, you could be forgiven for thinking that the consensus in the EU regarding an independent Scotland was bleak. Spain would, we’re told endlessly, veto Scotland’s place in the EU out of hand, and so, allegedly, would France.

And when Scotland’s First Minister went to Brussels after the referendum vote to meet with EU officials in regards to Scotland’s membership, we were told that this bold act of outreach fell on deaf ears.

The language of the press was hostile bordering on sadistic. The First Minister, acting to secure the democratic will of the people of Scotland, was apparently “running out of friends” and had to “beg” Ireland to help us out.

The reality, readers will be astonished to hear, is somewhat different.

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Earlier today we were moved to tweet our scepticism regarding a claim made by the Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, as reported in the Guardian.

Even on the most casual glance, the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. If 62% of Scots voted to stay in the EU and 55% voted to stay in the UK, with no correlation between the two things, then the Venn-diagram intersection between those two groups seems pretty unlikely to add up to more than 50%, let alone a “vast” majority.

So as we like to do, we checked.

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BBC Scotland is hosting a live TV debate tonight.

Despite having an even number of participants, the panel is split 3:1 in favour of Remain and 3:1 against independence (surely the biggest specifically Scottish issue likely to arise from the Brexit vote, and which several polls in the last couple of weeks now show is backed by a majority of voters).

Half of the debaters are also Labour politicians, which means that the third-placed party which got 22% of the vote in this May’s election has as much representation as two parties who got 69% between them.

We’ve been racking our brains for a couple of hours trying to work out a way in which such a multiply-skewed line-up could be justified (other than flat-out trolling), and we’ve got nothing. Does anyone have any ideas?

We’ve been watching the news all morning, and there’s only one sane response.