Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will doubtless have noticed that a post yesterday was disrupted by a series of strident and increasingly ill-tempered comments by a particular user, themed around their insistence that a central bank is a prerequisite of EU membership, and therefore Scotland wouldn’t be eligible if it was using Sterling as its currency OUTSIDE of a formal currency union with the rUK.

In fairness, that’s an assertion that quite a few people have made during the debate, and the commenter – eventually, having been repeatedly challenged for evidence to back up his claim – managed to provide a couple of examples, in the form of the New Statesman’s George Eaton and the Telegraph’s Andrew Lilico.

The problem, of course, was that those were just equally empty assertions which provided no evidence. So rather than argue the toss over interpretations of obtuse legalese, we thought we’d just go straight to the horse’s mouth, and we rang Graham Blyth, the Head of Office of the European Commission in Scotland.

Being such important people, we got straight through.

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The Wee Blue Book is extremely close to finished now, readers. We’re just buffing the corners. But we thought you might like to get a head start on one bit of it.

As well as trying to answer all the reasonable and sensible questions that undecided or No voters might have of the Yes side, the book will encourage them to ask a few tricky ones of their No representatives too, because we’ve been waiting two-and-a-half years for the media to do it with no luck.

But as you’ve been so awesome at writing to your MPs and MSPs before, enabling us to (for example) shed some cruelly harsh light on the full shambolic incoherence of Labour’s devolution plans, it seemed only fair that you got to have a go first.

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We got our reply (emphasis added):

“Good afternoon,

Thank you for your recent telephone call to the NHSBT Donor Line.

I can confirm that Scottish independence will not affect organ donation and the system will continue as it does currently.

I hope this answers your query, please let me know if you require any further information and I will be happy to help.

Kind regards,

Tom Kempster
ODR Assistant

NHS Blood and Transplant
Organ Donation and Transplantation Directorate
Fox Den Road
Stoke Gifford
Bristol
BS34 8RR”

Tom didn’t actually say the words “Gordon Brown is lying through his teeth to terrify Scottish people into voting No”, but we think it’s pretty much implied.

We telephoned Organ Donation Scotland on Friday for their reaction to the despicable scare stories being put around by a teenage Labour activist from Liverpool bussed up to Scotland last week by the No campaign.

We’re still waiting for them to get back to us with a quote. But in the meantime, it’s been predictable – but no less disgraceful – to see senior Labour figures repeating the lie. It all seems to be part of a major Unionist offensive on health, doubtless sparked by fears that privatisation of the English NHS will lead to a significant reduction in the Scottish block grant and corresponding damage to the Scottish health service.

The No camp, unsurprisingly, has chosen to fight fear with fear.

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Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, bless her wee heart, is banging once again in today’s Scottish Sun on the drum she’s made her own personal pet issue of the referendum campaign – the BBC.

The Tory chief – who likes to bash the public sector but has spent almost her entire life funded by the taxpayer, first as a Beeb employee, then as a student at a Scottish university and now as an MSP – notes that viewers in Ireland pay £5.50 a month to access the iPlayer, and that the same fate might befall an independent Scotland.

It sounds a reasonable argument, but like so many of the No camp’s assertions it unfortunately falls to pieces under the pressure of reality.

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An alert and concerned reader living in the USA sent us a survey this week. It claimed to be from a charity called The Friends Of Scotland, which first rang a bell with us in relation to a very popular article we ran about six weeks ago, and which referred to a committee in the US Senate called the Friends Of Scotland Caucus.

However, it turned out to be nothing to do with them. The Friends Of Scotland charity was actually the organisation which brought us Jack McConnell in a pinstripe kilt a few years back, and – some might say deservingly, if for that reason alone – it went bust last October. Its website is now vacant, and the most recent archived version of it that actually had any content dates back to September 2012.

We’ve as yet found no reference anywhere to the organisation being revived, so we’ll have to treat their credentials as suspect, but that’s not particularly relevant to us. Of more interest is that the questionnaire says the results of the poll will be forwarded to the Scottish media, and we thought you might want a little heads-up on its nature, just in case any of them decide to run with it.

We think it’s fair to say some of the questions may be very slightly biased.

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We got an email from an alert reader today making an intriguing observation. We feel sure we must be missing something about it, but we can’t figure out what it is.

Perhaps you can help.

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The Electoral Commission has this afternoon released the first of four sets of data about cash contributions and loans to referendum campaigning organisations, this one comprising information about donations over £7,500.

Having complained bitterly just a couple of months ago about being the “underdog” because “the Yes camp have more financial firepower”, Blair McDougall’s “Better Together” has trousered over £2.4m from rich business donors, whereas Yes Scotland has collected under £1.2m, almost all of it from lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

Those making gifts to various arms of the No campaign include the mysterious Rain Dance Investments (£200,000) – a company with no website, which appears to be based in an eight-bedroomed house in a small village in Lincoln which also seems to be home to numerous other companies.

Our favourites, though, without question, are the Stalbury Trustees.

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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.

The Guardian has a story today about what Herald journalist Paul Hutcheon pithily described yesterday as Jim Murphy MP’s “100 day tour of Scottish Labour activists”, which we’ve previously featured on this site.

But we were contacted by an alert reader who made a point echoed by one of the replies to Hutcheon’s tweet – doesn’t Mr Murphy already have a full-time job?

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Europe Direct is the official information service of the EU. A reader recently contacted them with a query. Their reply seems significant. We’ll let you read it for yourself.

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The Times has a front-page lead this morning on the “Better Together” rally held in Glasgow yesterday, at which the official lead campaign group debuted its new “No Thanks” slogan. The article makes an interesting claim:

“[Alistair Darling] was the only politician to speak at the Better Together rally in Glasgow. All the others were ordinary men and women who had volunteered to talk about why they were campaigning to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.

They were led by Claire Lally, a mother from Clydebank, with a child with serious health problems. She said she would do all she could to save the United Kingdom and protect the health service that had saved her daughter.”

Well, that all seems legit.

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