Wings Over Scotland

There’s a glorious piece in today’s Daily Mail from BritNat arch-troll Simon Heffer, in which he fumes and splutters about the outrageous idea of finding himself, thanks to the huge surge in support for the SNP since the referendum, ruled next year by a government “that only a small minority in England would have voted for”.

We’re sure that Scots everywhere will empathise with the unfortunate Mr Heffer’s intolerable plight, having many decades of experience of that very scenario. We’d also be interested to know, however, if he sent a submission to the Smith Commission detailing his radical solution to the whole devolution issue, as outlined in the Mail on 6 September this year:

“Far better than offering ‘devo max’, a post-referendum non-independent Scotland should be forced into a fresh start with a reduction in the amount of English taxpayer-funded subsidies.”

We very much hope that he did.

Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today marked the historic nomination of Scotland’s first female First Minister with a Daily Record column in characteristically sour style, which waited until the second paragraph before sticking in a Margaret Thatcher comparison.

It wasn’t until later that it got confusing.

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On the left the Observer yesterday, on the right the Guardian this morning.

Imagine the UK’s great newspaper of the liberal left repeatedly confusing Theresa May with Esther McVey, or Harriet Harman with Dianne Abbott. Feel the comradely love.

Concerning this:

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Who’s this? A bunch of lairy, pissed-up neds on a stag weekend?

Nope. Labour members of the Scottish and UK Parliaments, out “campaigning” in Glasgow today. This is their job. You’re paying them to do this. Be proud, Scotland.

Thank goodness there are only 18 days of the independence campaign remaining. We’re not sure we have the capacity to absorb much more idiocy like the below.

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Here’s “Better Together” chief Blair McDougall in today’s Herald:

“Launching the [#PatronisingBTLady] video yesterday, Better Together campaign director Blair McDougall said: ‘The key factor for people isn’t the love of our country – as both Yes and No voters love Scotland. The key factor is the love of our families.’“

Let’s just read that through again. He’s saying that his campaign can’t use “love of our country” as a campaign weapon because people on both sides love their country. So instead he’s going to use “love of our families” as a distinguishing characteristic.

The only possible conclusion that can be drawn from those statements is that Yes supporters don’t love their families. It’s a bold gambit, we’ll give him that.

Remember the happy days of 2012 when Unionists complained endlessly that the independence debate was in danger of becoming bogged down by arguments about process rather than politics, readers?

We’re now in the third straight day of the No campaign and the media obsessing about a process (an independent Scotland’s currency arrangements) rather than the principle of whether Scotland should choose its own governments.

Above is a double-page spread from today’s Scottish Sun, which has extremely unusually gone with a front-page splash on politics (rather than its usual diet of celebrity freakshows) for the last three days, and which continues to hammer away – as all three opposition leaders did at FMQs yesterday – on the boneheaded demand for a “Plan B” if the rUK rejects a currency union.

The Sun does so despite devoting most of one of those pages to Alex Salmond telling them EXACTLY what Plan B would be, but evidently they’re a bit slow on the uptake, so let’s see if we can spell it out in words simple enough for Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson, Willie Rennie and Andrew Nicoll to understand.

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Kerry Gill in the Scottish Daily Express, 17 July 2014:

“Two months to go until the referendum, but acrimony will last for years

There are just two calendar months to go before we go to the ballot box to decide whether we prefer Scotland to remain within the proven safety of the United Kingdom, or take a chance on Alex Salmond’s distintegrating case for separation.

The Yes Scotland campaign – comprised largely of SNP members and sympathisers, aided by a ragbag of Green nationalists, a small number of disaffected Labour voters and rather more anti-English bigots than anyone cares to admit – is in trouble.

On September 19, whatever the result may be, we will all have to try to get along together, but it will be difficult, no matter the good intentions.”

Our emphasis. It sure is a mystery where this “acrimony” is coming from, eh readers? Perhaps, if we all have to get along together after the referendum, it might possibly be better not to engage in furious, unhinged rants where you call your opponents a bunch of racist bigots. Just a thought, like.

There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.

For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.

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Louise Morton is the Vice Chair of Moray Labour Party. She’s already familiar to some of our more veteran and alert readers for laughing when Yes activists were intimidated out of campaigning at a local fair with threats of violence.

Less than two days after Labour’s hapless candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus resigned for likening some children at a peaceful protest to the Hitler Youth, Ms Morton – whose son Sean is the party’s 2015 candidate for the Moray seat – thought it’d be a wizard jape to tweet this:

It’s like a disease, readers. They can’t keep a lid on their hatred to save their lives.

Jill Stephenson is (or maybe was) Professor Emerita of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh. She was the subject of a substantial profile piece in the Times a couple of months ago on the subject of the independence campaign, which called her “one of the most compelling voices in support of the Union” (as well as somewhat inflating her status to just “Professor Emerita of History”), and therefore we must take her to be a respectable commentator who wouldn’t tell crude flat-out lies.

So we were intrigued to notice the above tweet from yesterday. Can anyone point us to Professor Curtice actually making such a claim? It would surely be significant if the country’s leading (and apparently only) psephologist had indeed said that Yes voters were just a bunch of thickos. At the very least it would somewhat colour his analysis, which we’ve hitherto always considered professional and impartial.

We’ve got to pop out for a bit, so any help would be appreciated.