Wings Over Scotland

STV Sport has tonight broken the news that Scotland will play England in a friendly international at Hampden on November 18 this year.

Would you like to imagine, readers, the songs the visiting England support might sing if Scotland had voted to continue being ruled by them exactly two months earlier?

If you feel your strength sapping between now and September, remember that.

To cut a long story short, Wings readers, it turns out that by a freakish coincidence I have a fax number only one digit different to that of Alistair Darling’s constituency office. Attached below is a document I unexpectedly found in my in-tray this evening.

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It’s already been in the comments, and it’s all over Twitter, but it’d be remiss of us not to give as many people as possible the chance to enjoy this.

Blair McDougall’s a big Rangers fan. See if you can spot him anywhere.

We’ve had a go at this subject once before, but this time we’ve come up with a less hyperbolic analogy. It was sparked by another Twitter comment from Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, which cropped up last night in the middle of some truly abject cringing from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall.

.@bobby_mckail@Dungarbhan@blairmcdougall@Jenemm3 My country is Scotland.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) November 7, 2013

We couldn’t help but note the use of the singular.

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We were very proud of a terrific performance from Scotland at Wembley last night, in a highly entertaining friendly the national side was unlucky to lose due to a couple of lapses in concentration at set pieces. We also greatly enjoyed the tremendous atmosphere created by both sets of fans, which we read about in the Daily Mail:

“It seemed the days of booing national anthems had passed. But old habits die hard against the Auld Enemy so Flower of Scotland got the treatment and God Save the Queen was booed in response. Pretty unsavoury all round.”

And also in the Scottish Daily Mail:

“The sing-off was generally good-natured but the Scottish contingent let themselves down badly at the start as a cacophony of boos drowned out God Save The Queen after respect was afforded Flower Of Scotland.”

Wait, what?

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There’s one last bit of data from our poll that we haven’t revealed the results of yet. That’s because, unlike the rest of the survey, this one absolutely WAS a leading question. We asked it partly to satirise the ridiculously slanted nature of those used in some “Better Together” polls, such as this one, but also to make a more serious point.

If you’re looking forward to Wednesday’s game at Wembley, this one’s for you.

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The weekend’s Scotland on Sunday contained another in a long series of doom-laden predictions about the state of an independent Scotland’s defences, including the assertion that current Scottish soldiers would choose to stay with the British armed forces rather than join Scotland’s because it’d be more exciting.

(Along, as independence supporters would expect, with the standard boilerplate that we’d all be killed by terrorists, and the now-traditional dodgy Scotsman poll.)

The Sunday Times, meanwhile, wasn’t being quite so careful.

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It’s going to be tough to hold our heads up abroad if Scotland actually democratically votes not to take responsibility for its own affairs like any normal grown-up country.

In any vaguely self-respecting world, a No vote would be accompanied by the immediate disbandment of the Scottish national football and rugby teams, because we’d have declared ourselves not to be a nation. But either way, hopefully we won’t have to face scenes of opposing fans telling us to man up again after 2014.

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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We thought we might as well actually put figures to the impact of Rangers’ liquidation on the rest of the clubs in the SPL in season 2012-13. So we did. If you don’t want to read another article about football, look away now.

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The debate about whether Scotland could survive and flourish outside the Union is uncannily similar to the one that filled the media a year ago about whether Scottish football could live without Rangers. (And which by a strange and almost inexplicable coincidence tends to feature many of the same people on the respective sides.)

As the events of the spring and summer of 2012 unfolded, even the game’s own governing body insisted that separating the rest of the SPL from the Union Jack-loving Ibrox club would reap a disastrous whirlwind of destruction, with businesses (sponsors) fleeing in terror and clubs becoming impoverished without the generous subsidy of thousands of visiting Rangers fans.

In the end, despite the most strenuous efforts of the SFA, SPL and SFL to override the wishes of their customers with a campaign of relentless and increasingly-hysterical fearmongering, the new “Rangers” was denied both entry to the SPL and a “leapfrog” into SFL 1, and joined Scottish football at the lowest professional level.

So how did post-apocalypse life turn out in the people’s game?

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Yesterday saw the release of the latest unemployment figures. They showed Scottish unemployment falling by 11,000 to its lowest level in four years – dropping below the 200,000 barrier for the first time since 2009, after five successive months of falls – with the number of people in work showing its biggest increase for almost 13 years.

The figures came against a backdrop of continuing increases in UK joblessness, leaving the Scottish unemployment rate significantly below that of the rest of the country. The Scottish economy also grew by 0.5% over the most recent measured period, while that of the UK continued to shrink.

We know what you’re thinking – this is GOOD news, right?

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