Wings Over Scotland

While we wait for the full detail of what look like being even more watered-down and insipid “Devo Lite” proposals from Labour than we were expecting, we suppose we might as well spend a minute on last night’s big “Better Together” announcement that Eddie Izzard was going to hold a benefit gig for the No campaign, putting the Union on a par with starving Ethiopians and earthquake victims.

Einstein is claimed to have said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (and readers hopefully already know our views on Quote Nazis), so we found a line attributed to Izzard in the press release particularly striking.

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We’re given to believe that this is real, not a spoof.

Just when we thought our opinion of them couldn’t possibly sink any lower.

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Here’s the Scottish Conservatives deputy leader Jackson Carlaw, fuming on the BBC website yesterday about the £1.3m cost of producing and distributing the Scottish Government’s independence white paper:

“This would be a considerable spend for a work of fact, but this must be one of the biggest ever taxpayer-funded investments for a work of fiction.

The public will feel extremely shortchanged over this, particularly given there’s only one page on Scotland’s economy.

Alex Salmond himself admitted in the Scottish Parliament chamber that this is a document containing SNP propaganda, and it’s utterly ridiculous that he should be sanctioning taxpayers’ money for this.”

So, that’s pretty clear. Even though they’ve spent much of the last two years demanding the Scottish Government answer literally hundreds of questions about independence, the Tories don’t believe that it’s worth spending slightly less than 25p per Scot to actually give the people those answers.

But wait – what’s this coming over the hill? Is it a monster?

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Earlier today we may have given some readers the impression that Gordon Brown’s six-point proposals for the constitutional future of Scotland within the UK were weak, vague and essentially meaningless waffle.

However, now that we’ve seen the recommendations (in a report rather egotistically entitled “Campbell II”) also produced today by Sir Menzies Campbell of the Liberal Democrats, we’ve realised that by comparison Mr Brown has delivered a masterwork of comprehensive, considered and well-thought-out detail.

Get a load – and we do mean a load – of this, readers.

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It was good to see our old pal, prolific Labour and “Better Together” activist Duncan Hothersall, welcoming the chance for everyone to learn from mistakes yesterday with regard to giving out people’s personal information on the internet.

Of course, Roseanna Cunningham only revealed contact info that was already in the public domain and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, and which had been widely sent out by the person concerned in a spray of unsolicited begging letters. It’d be much worse to give out contact information that was previously unknown and was only sent to one person in a private email, right?

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Prominent New Labour writer Dan Hodges has a piece in the Telegraph today (because where else would a New Labour commentator have a column?) about UKIP now being an openly racist party. It contains the following passage:

“Last May Farage visited Edinburgh, where he was met by a small but aggressive mob of protesters. Eventually he had to be escorted from the scene by police for his own safety.

Directly accusing the SNP of being behind the protest, Farage described the protesters as ‘racist Nazi scum’. The incident was, he said, ‘deeply racist and displayed a total hatred of the English’.

And he’s right. He wasn’t targeted on the basis of his race, but on the basis of his nationality. And as he said, that was racist.”

We’ll leave aside that the protest was nothing to do with the SNP or Scottish nationalists, that it was organised by a radical left-wing group and that one of the two men arrested in connection with the incident was in fact English himself. None of those factual inconveniences are allowed to get in the way of Hodges’ bigotry.

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Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail on Wall Street Journal Live yesterday.

“I would be very surprised if at the end of the day the Scots will vote for independence. It’s a fantasy, it’s a romantic fantasy, it’s fuelled by fantasy, by resentment, by all sorts of issues.”

Shall we take five minutes out from hating the English and give her a surprise?

Our old pal Euan McColm of Scotland on Sunday and ThinkScotland (also a stalwart of BBC/STV punditry, and formerly of the disgraced News Of The World) thinks you’re all just a figment of our imagination, readers.

If you’re not following, the implication (also made by James Mackenzie of “Better Nation”) is that we’re taking the money out of the fundraiser as soon as it comes in, then paying it back in ourselves as a new donation to artificially inflate the total.

(Although we’re not quite sure WHY we’d be doing that, as it would only result in us losing a sizeable chunk of the money we already had in commission every time we “recycled” it, and it would dissuade people from donating because they saw we’d already hit our target, and finally it’d mean that we then had to fund all the things we promised to do without actually having the money to pay for them.)

We’ve offered to show Mr McColm the books, on the condition that he writes an article for Scotland on Sunday or the Scotsman, openly and directly accusing us of what he implies in the tweets above. Let’s see how that goes.

Another scrupulously balanced panel from the state broadcaster.

The papers-review slot is turning into quite the little regular treat.

Yesterday, a wealthy American man who as far as we know won’t have a vote in the referendum expressed a personal opinion about independence which made the front page of half of Scotland and Britain’s newspapers, was trumpeted all over the TV and radio, and got “Better Together” very excited.

This morning some idiot based in Luxembourg honked about it on BBC Breakfast news, throwing in his own clueless and ill-informed (and of course, unchallenged) view. We’re having some difficulty working out why we’re supposed to care about either man’s position, or why they were given lots of free airtime to espouse them.

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It takes some doing to make even BBC News presenters look a little uncomfortable at the sheer depth of your ignorance when it comes to Scottish independence, so we probably ought to offer some sort of commendation to this guy:

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Poor Anas Sarwar. He just can’t get anything right.

Doing his best to join in with the Daily Mail’s month-long witch-hunt, Labour’s “deputy” leader in Scotland leaps on an abusive and disturbingly racist-looking comment aimed at him. It’s nasty all right. It could well qualify as “hate”. But who’s it from?

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