Here’s Baron Wallace Of Tankerness on Spain, in 1997:
Yeah, because devolution killed Catalan nationalism stone dead too, right Jim?
The wording of that headline isn’t strictly accurate, because the Claim Of Right For Scotland – signed in 1989 by over 80% of Scottish MPs, and many other politicians and representatives of “civic Scotland” – isn’t a law, and has no binding force.
Nevertheless, it’s a document that carries a certain amount of political weight, as an open acknowledgement by Labour and the Liberal Democrats that the people of Scotland (not Parliament and the monarch, as is the case in England) are sovereign and are entitled to determine the form of government they want.
Up to a point, anyway.
Well done to the alert reader who spotted this 2006 Q&A with Jack Straw MP, former Foreign Secretary and then Leader of the House Of Commons, on the BBC website:
It’s been quite the week, so to celebrate smashing our all-time one-day pageviews record twice in succession, here’s a wee And Finally… bonus extra.
You’ve probably already seen this on Twitter today, after alert reader “Corstorphine Craig” knocked up an inventive graphic from some old material and sent it to us, whereupon we retweeted it and it went rather viral. But it deserves a front-page spot.
Viewers of a certain age will of course recall how well the coal mines, Ravenscraig, Linwood and Bathgate all flourished in the safe hands of the UK when Scotland was swindled out of its Assembly despite voting in favour of it.
But as the parties of the Union and their tame media fall over themselves to rubbish the sensible, achievable vision laid out in the White Paper this week, it never hurts to remember how their scare stories usually end.
We’ve already had a message from the future today. Here’s one from 101 years ago.
Click to see the full story, and heed the tale well, jam-tomorrow fans.
When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.
When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.
As we’ve already noted today, Wings Over Scotland has the internet’s most excellent readers. Two of them have been working together over the last week or so, after we put them in touch, to share some fascinating Scottish history with the rest of us.
Click the two images in this post for an intriguing hour-and-three-quarters.
We’d never heard of this until a reader mentioned it this morning in the comments, and it seems worth bringing to wider attention. The article we’re about to (re)print below is a transcript originally created by the now-defunct www.alba.org, along with a couple of extracts from the Scottish press of the time.
The original version is still visible on www.archive.org, but we’ve tidied it up a bit and added a few notes and comments of our own in red.
It’s funny what you find when you’re not looking for it. As a result of a piece we wrote yesterday, we found ourselves tracking back through some older posts to check a couple of facts, and stumbled across something quite interesting.
Within certain limited parameters of “interesting”, of course.
We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.
Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.
We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:
The devil, they say, is in the detail, and that certainly seems to apply to the UK Government’s first paper on the consequences of Scottish independence. With remarkably little fanfare, the coalition appears to have dropped an atomic bomb into the heart of the constitutional debate, and not even realised it.
The core premise of the document appears to be the counter-intuitive idea that the UK can have it both ways – it can insist that an independent Scotland would be a brand-new nation with no rights to any of the shared property of the UK, but that it would somehow simultaneously be responsible for its full share of the UK’s liabilities. Michael Moore is quoted saying precisely that in today’s Herald.
The justification for this outwardly-absurd claim rests on an astonishing assertion lurking unassumingly in a series of paragraphs in the middle of the paper. We’ve copied it below and highlighted a couple of the relevant phrases.
This splendid BBC news piece from 1975 about the Glasgow Underground appears to have been shot in some sort of awful, nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland. Or, put another way, a large and once-prosperous city run by Scottish Labour for 50 years.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
