EXCLUSIVE! Wings Over Scotland discovers that after studying a number of secret UK Government documents the BBC is resigned to a Yes vote, has already removed Scotland from all its maps of the “United Kingdom”, and is preparing to replace the whole of BBC Scotland with Jeremy Clarkson after independence.
Eggheads is going to be a bit different.
We know the No campaign is dead set against entering any discussions before the independence referendum, but we were so moved by Willie Rennie’s concern today about Scotland not having enough time to “negotiate over 14,000 international treaties“ in the 16 months between a Yes vote and the first elections to an independent Holyrood that we thought we’d help him out a bit with some advance work.
We did enquire of Mr Rennie as to where these “14,000 international treaties” could be found, but he was too busy helping poor people by fining them £80 a month to answer. Luckily, alert reader Angus McLellan was hot on the case, and swiftly directed us to a handy Foreign Office website featuring the magic number.
We’ve now had a brief skim through some of the UK’s historic agreements with other countries, and to save some time after 2014 we’ve knocked a few off the list.
It’s one of the defining mysteries of the independence debate so far. The Scottish Government says that an independent Scotland would remain an EU member at all times before, during and after the process of dissolving the UK, with the precise terms being negotiated. The UK Government, meanwhile, insists that Scotland would be thrown out of the EU and have to reapply for membership.
The EU has said it’s happy to settle this dispute, but only on receipt of a request from the UK Government to issue a definitive position. The Scottish Government has urged the UK Government to do so, but the UK Government refuses, despite its professed confidence in its view and the huge propaganda victory that would presumably result.
We can only assume that the UK Government is too busy to write the letter, occupied as it is with destroying the British economy and society. So as a helpful time-saving gesture of goodwill and in the interests of informed debate, we’ve done it for them.
We’re even happy to put a stamp on it, pop out (we need milk anyway) and stick it in the postbox ourselves. Just say the word, Prime Minister.
We’re unimaginably thrilled to bring you our very first ever official Wings Over Scotland cartoon, composed and drawn by regular reader and commenter Chris Cairns.
We feel like a proper grown-up newspaper now.
We’ve got a bit of a dodgy Freeview picture this morning thanks to the weather, but we THINK this is what we just heard on the news from all the Tories (and others) who want the UK to leave the EU, but Scotland to stay in the UK.
Thanks to many alert viewers for sending in some we didn’t quite catch.
It’s almost too easy to take all the cheap shots that David Cameron’s much-trailed, long-awaited speech about UK membership of the EU left open.
From a Scottish perspective it was difficult to suppress a hollow laugh, for example, when the Prime Minister said of some prominent non-EU nations: “I admire those countries and they are friends of ours – but they are very different from us. Norway sits on the biggest energy reserves in Europe, and has a sovereign wealth fund of over €500bn“
It’s also tempting to simply marvel (again) at the mind-boggling witlessness of the “Better Together” campaign, who spent the final weeks of last year hollering from the rooftops about how Scottish independence might bring about the terrifying prospect of Scotland finding itself out of Europe, when they MUST have known that Cameron was about to make that same thing a far more real possibility within the UK than outside it.
(The No camp’s willingness to keep on energetically hurling hefty boomerangs at the independence movement, no matter how many come flying back and hit them in the teeth, is truly one of the wonders of the modern age.)
While we welcomed the definitive answer on the question of an independent Scotland’s relationship to the United Kingdom, we were a little disturbed by something Alistair Darling said about Europe in his Newsnight Scotland interview last night.
It happened at 13m 42s. See what you think. (Emphasis Darling’s own this time.)
It’s possible to watch video footage of Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the Holyrood chamber on Thursday (and the debate following it) online, but it’s rather difficult to find the text in searchable form. The only place we were able to locate it took some advanced-level Googling to find and was behind a paywall, so we’ve reprinted it below for reference, because we’re about to cite it in another article.
We suppose we really ought to start saying “British nationalist”, but it’s a bit long.
We’ve found that “answering a different question to the one you were actually asked” is something of a Unionist specialist subject – Alistair Darling gave a masterclass in the strategy on today’s edition of the Daily Politics. Still, you heard it here first, folks.
The anti-independence campaign and the Scottish media have been loudly affecting great triumph recently over a rather curious claim. Namely, they’ve been insisting the Scottish Government’s acknowledgement that it would be required to negotiate the terms of an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union represents some manner of U-turn on an alleged previous assertion to the contrary.
(Ken MacIntosh, for example, tells the chamber at 21m that the SNP “has finally admitted that the terms of Scotland’s EU membership are a matter of negotiation”.)
Let’s examine the reality.
“Choosing Scotland’s Future” was the title of a Scottish Government document published in 2007 as part of what the SNP called the National Conversation. Clause 3.18 on page 22 reads as follows (our emphasis):
“Negotiations would also be required concerning the terms of Scotland’s (and the rest of the United Kingdom’s) continuing membership of the European Union and other international bodies to which Scotland currently belongs as a component nation of the United Kingdom.”
Clause 3.21 on the next page continues (our emphasis again):
“An independent Scotland would continue in the European Union and bear the burdens and fulfil the responsibilities of membership. Following negotiations on the detailed terms of membership, Scotland would be in a similar position to other European Union member states of a similar size.”
Well, that seems to wrap that up.
What with all the hoo-ha about what Jose Manuel Barroso did and didn’t say about membership of the EU this week, we decided – what with being proper journalists and everything – to take matters into our own hands in an attempt to get to the truth. Caroline Winchester is the European Commission’s Press & Policy Officer at its Scottish office in Edinburgh. We emailed her directly yesterday. (Emphasis added.)
If there’s one thing we all ought to grudgingly respect about the No campaign, it’s its ability to get all its ducks in a row and pump out an absolutely united and consistent lie. It’s a lot like a World War 1 artillery barrage – impressive in the sheer co-ordinated brute force of its display, even if it’s in fact completely useless in achieving its desired objective and ultimately leads only to a slaughter of its own troops.
Jose Manuel Barroso must be marvelling at it today. Time after time after time he’s quite unmistakeably said “I am NOT referring to Scotland, I’m talking in generalities”, only for the British media to report it, with a single unified voice, as the EC President making clear and specific proclamations directly about Scotland.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
