Wings Over Scotland

[This piece was originally titled "Why Piracy Is Good" when I wrote it in August of 2004. I figured I'd make it gratuitously offensive clickbait this time, just for teh funz. If you don't understand the new title, start here.]

It's weird how the simplest games can have the longest stories. Today we're going to talk (well, I'm going to, anyway) about a couple of games (well, four games, but we'll get to that) that are about as Zen-basic as it's possible for electronic entertainment to be.

They're a pair of games which could be played by the one-armed dishwasher from Robin's Nest (one for the mums and dads, there), a duo that require all the brainpower of a starving dog pondering the best course of action to take with a pound of sausages that's just fallen out of an old lady's shopping bag right under his nose.

And yet, by the time we're done we'll have covered inspiration, plagiarism, moral flexibility, flagrant copyright infringement, public-spiritedness, cultural history, corporate pragmatism, collective short-sightedness and the proudest moment in your correspondent's career to date. Which is a lot of stuff, so let's get on or we'll be here all day.

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(We suspect this might become a regular series.) We try not to take any notice of the often-ludicrous propaganda churned out by the official “Better Together” campaign, but today’s was too utterly ridiculous to ignore. We’re not going to deface our nice pages with the image, though you can see it here if you want to without giving them any hits.

The graphic claimed, mind-bogglingly, that the award of £2.3bn in grants to good causes in Scotland by the National Lottery since its advent in 1993 was “another reason we are better together”, as if the figure represented some great largesse towards Scotland on the part of the UK. This, as any reader with an IQ higher than the number on a lottery ball will immediately realise, is such a monumental and obvious misrepresentation of how the lottery works that we can only concur with the Twitter user who enquired “When will the glue-sniffing stop at BT strategy HQ?”

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We hope you’re just drunk, Ian. Honestly we do.

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We can’t even be bothered linking to Brian Wilson‘s latest load of “will-this-do?” money for old rope in The Scotsman. We also can’t be bothered refuting any of its infantile, defamatory lies, which would all embarrass any grown-up newspaper that retained a shred of pride in its content. And we’re not going to occupy any more of our valuable time demolishing the central argument, when Brian has so helpfully done it for us himself right in the middle of his own article.

HEADLINE
“Shetland has the right to go it alone”

COPY
“There is little evidence that Shetland particularly wants to be independent”

There is? That’s that all sorted out, then. We’ve got a long queue of drivelling eejits to deal with today, Brian – have a lollipop and move along, there’s a good wee lad.

You might enjoy this line from approximately the Guardian’s 400th hopeful “Come on, Labour, you can do it!” article of the last couple of years. We’ve actually read some pretty interesting analysis on the possible outcomes of the 2015 UK general election recently, but this bit of content-free space-filler from Jackie Ashley wasn’t among it. The second sentence was something to cherish, though:

“2012 was the Olympics; 2014 will be European elections and the run-up to the general election.”

Nothing else of any interest happening in the United Kingdom in 2014, then, Jackie? Such as, y’know, it perhaps ceasing to exist? Still, those European elections eh?

Supporters of independence often level the accusation at Unionists that they think Scotland is “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to thrive on its own. Unionists generally affect great insult at the suggestion, and have taken to being much more circumspect about the first two, nowadays tending to claim that Scotland could survive without Westminster control, just that it shouldn’t, because of all the positive aspects of the Union such as [SUB FILL IN LATER PLEASE].

Accordingly, the “too wee, too poor” element of the argument against independence has taken something of a back seat in the last year or so, and the “too stupid” part has been correspondingly pushed to the foreground.

Firstly, we’re simply told that – for some reason – Scotland does better if all its big decisions are taken in London, leading inescapably to the conclusion that we’re not as bright as our betters to the south. But more crudely, we’re also shown on a regular basis just how bad independence could be.

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The office is the coldest room in my house. Facing north it doesn't get a lot of sunlight, and the radiator is directly underneath the window, so much of what heat it generates disappears outside immediately. So I have a little halogen heater to keep the place cosy in winter, which also gives off a bright and pleasant firesidey glow and saves you having to turn the light on then wait 45 minutes for the useless "energy-saving" piece of shit to actually reach some sort of vaguely worthwhile level of illumination.

(Never mind about the Iraq war – I'd put Tony fucking Blair in prison for the rest of his life just for robbing us of proper lightbulbs, the wanker.)

The heater has three replaceable halogen elements. This is the process for replacing one of them (click to see the whole thing):

I have two questions for the manufacturers.

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Just one plucked from a fine crop of halfwits on Tory MP and former minister John Redwood’s blog. A warm welcome, readers, for Mr Bert Young. (We’ve tidied up some of his formatting for him a bit – no spaces before punctuation marks, Professor – but the comment is otherwise presented unedited and in its entirety.)

“A part solution to the SNP’s position is to bring the N Sea oil ashore in England! Extending the pipe work and off-loading the ships South of the Border is a simple matter and would bring home the message to the SNP that Scotland simply cannot afford to be “independent”. The N Sea Oil is owned by International organisations and not by Scotland; its source is in British and International waters. The SNP ‘s case is completely demolished unless they explain how they are going to pay off Scotland’s rightful share of the National Debt and maintain the sort of life style they have been able to enjoy under the UK umbrella. I cannot believe that any rational thinking Scot would want to support Scotland withdrawing from the UK.”

Better together!

Crybaby Nation is a land without borders. But a couple of recent news items from it do have a particularly Scottish flavour. One of them, also reported in the Daily Record, concerned an expat Scot and Motherwell supporter in the US banned from having “MWELLFC” on his car licence plate, on the barely-believable grounds that someone might interpret it as “ME WELL F**KED” and be offended. The other one, though, shames us more, because it happened on our own patch.

According to STV News, two new Grampian Fire & Rescue Service vehicles have had to be taken in and repainted after two people complained that the Saltire on their front grilles was a “political symbol”, connected to the SNP and independence movement.

We’re not even going to insult you by pointing out what pathetic, cringing, snivelling creatures those making a complaint against their own country’s flag must be, or how irrational the argument is. We’re just going to slump face-down onto our desk and sob for a couple of minutes about the gutless “corporate team” who allegedly decided to back down over it. We’ll be with you again shortly.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

Some alert listeners picked up a curious story on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland, which was reported on the Tattie Scones blog and which we immediately set about investigating further. It was another outing for the “Scotland could be partitioned after the independence referendum” nonsense first peddled by a Tory peer back in January of this year, and picked up by unhinged Scotsman columnist Michael Kelly in August, but the latest advocate of slicing Scotland into countless separate parts that could require you to cross international borders a dozen times on a drive from Dumfries to Dingwall was our old pal Ian Davidson.

The Glasgow MP, who to the astonishment of alien observers from far-off galaxies has been placed in charge of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in order to conduct a fully impartial analysis of Scottish “separation”, apparently made the suggestion sometime this week, but GMS curiously failed to include either an interview or a quote in its 69-second news report, which you can hear in its entirety by clicking on this link.

The piece also suggested that some of Davidson’s own colleagues were among those pouring scorn on the ludicrous notion, but declined to identify any of them. It wasn’t repeated in the rest of the programme, and we’re still none the wiser as to when and where the comments were made. (Although we know when it wasn’t.)

If any reader can enlighten us, please feel free.