Wings Over Scotland

There’s a strange phenomenon at the heart of Scottish politics, and it runs far deeper than the independence referendum. It’s summed up pretty well in this image.

The picture and the comment alongside come from the Facebook page of Labour’s newest Parliamentary candidate, Kathy Wiles. They were made more than two months ago, so you’d imagine that any selection committee worth even a quarter of a damn would have checked her out enough to have a look at her social-media accounts and see if she might have said – or be likely to say in future – anything stupid.

But the thing is, we’re sure they did. Because as far as Scottish Labour as concerned, calling “most” of the voters of the most popular party in the country a bunch of workshy scroungers only interested in claiming benefits isn’t even a gaffe. It’s pretty much the official policy position.

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Launched amid much fanfare over a year ago, Scottish Labour’s ironically-named “2014 Truth Team” has been a source of great merriment to Yes supporters for many months. Having apparently run out of “truth” after just a few weeks of snarky tweets, the account had been silent since last summer, so imagine our surprise when it suddenly burst back into life today.

We say “back”, but in fact the Twitter account had been wiped clean as if it had never existed. All the old followers were still there, but now there were just four tweets, all of them advertising an exciting new feature on the Scottish Labour website entitled “The Top 20 Nationalist Assertions” and promising to “set out the facts” about them – the implication being, of course, that the assertions were untrue.

Fact-checking, eh? Well, that’s the sort of thing we just can’t resist.

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Multiple journalists are now reporting that no matter what the result of the Western Isles count tomorrow, UKIP have pipped the SNP, by a narrow margin, to Scotland’s sixth European Parliament seat.

Scots, you just let David Coburn speak for you on an international stage. Well done.

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Dear God. It’s now almost two and a half years since this site first comprehensively debunked and disproved the notion that Scottish independence would give the Conservatives a permanent majority in the rUK parliament, in an article that’s been read many tens of thousands of times here and spread far and wide elsewhere.

So you’ll forgive us if we spend a few minutes smashing our heads against a brick wall in despair at the mind-bleeding idiocy of some slobbering, sponge-witted poltroon quoted at length in the Telegraph today.

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The Scotland Office has today released yet another taxpayer-funded (though we’re not allowed to know how much) document about how rubbish and useless Scotland is. Issued in the name of Alistair Carmichael, it reheats and repeats all the same lines from the previous papers, but this time dumbed down a bit for thickos.

You’d think that having been churning out the same thing for two years, the UK government would have at least managed to get its story straight by now.

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We can’t remember if anyone mentioned this last week when we were talking about the Scotland Office’s bizarre Buzzfeed escapades, so we’ll just put it up here now.

There’s something not quite right about that picture and the words underneath it, isn’t there, readers? Have you spotted it yet?

We were going to take the night off until we read this drivel. Gah.

And if we’re being honest, we were just too pleased with the pun.

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Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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Remember, kids – nationalism is bad. Stay away from the evil nationalists, or they might steal your Union Jack flag, Union Jack t-shirt or Royal Standard.

The only number that can be divided to end up with nothing is zero.

Every time today that we’ve re-watched Johann Lamont’s multi-vehicular pile-up of an interview on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, we’ve seen something new in it that we missed previously and which makes us pull this face:

So (hngh) we’re going to have to get these down for posterity.

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