Wings Over Scotland

Gordon Brown is expected to be up on his hind legs again in the Commons today – a second appearance in a week that’ll almost certainly be the mainly-absent opposition backbencher’s busiest period of activity in Parliament since the 2010 election.

He’ll be inexplicably getting time to lay out his views on devolution again, despite having absolutely no power to implement them, and it seems reasonable to imagine that he’ll spend a fair bit of time on the contents of the infamous “vow” he brokered days before the Scottish independence referendum.

One line of that vow ran “We agree that the UK exists to ensure opportunity and security for all by sharing our resources equitably across all four nations”. And as “pooling and sharing resources” was Mr Brown’s catchphrase during the campaign, we thought it might be worthwhile taking a look at what that means in practice.

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There’s been a lot of talk on Twitter and Facebook of irregularities at the referendum counts, leading to accusations that the referendum was somehow fixed, culminating in a petition to have the procedures investigated, or even the referendum re-run. As with most conspiracy theories, this is largely down to people not understanding what they’re seeing, as the videos flying around the internet showing bits of the count have been removed from their context.

For example, there’s a video showing a counting table with a No sign on it with a pile of ballot papers, with the top paper showing a cross beside Yes. To the uninformed observer, this looks like Yes votes have been dumped on a table of No votes; but in reality, the pile of votes were still waiting to be split up into Yes and No at this point, and if the person making the video had bothered to check, they’d have found this out.

So here’s a quick guide to how the count worked, as observed by one of this website’s own official monitoring agents (specifically me).

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Now, technically there are still around 20 minutes of the 19th left as we write this, but we’re reasonably sure that Parliament is now closed for the night and as far as we can tell this doesn’t seem to have happened.

You’ll let us know if you spot it, won’t you, readers?

Last week we highlighted the dismissive, contemptuous attitude of many Scottish Labour MPs and MSPs to questions from their constituents, an approach perhaps borne of the safe seats occupied by most of those concerned. However, some politicians from the three Unionist parties in Scotland do still deign to correspond with the electorate, and it would be unfair of us not to acknowledge and credit them for that.

Below, then, are the other responses that Wings readers received to a number of questions relating to independence that we suggested they might like to pose to their elected representatives way back in July. (We’ve given it six weeks, and it seems safe to assume that any who haven’t replied by now aren’t going to.)

It’s a lengthy read, but we think you’ll find it enlightening.

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There’s something fascinating about the latest “No Thanks” leaflet that’s slithering its way through letterboxes in Scotland this week, and it’s not the empty sloganising it deploys in lieu of an argument. (“We’re better together because best of both worlds!”)

It’s this graph.

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Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.

We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.

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Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.

He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.

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The startling lack of “grassroots” support in the No campaign has been a recurring theme on this site. Time and again, people presented as typical members of the public turn out to be dedicated political activists with a vested interest in the status quo.

The “Better Together” website has a long-running series of blog posts under the banner “Why I’m saying No Thanks”. All of the people featured in it are introduced with no mention of any involvment in politics. Out of idle curiosity we thought we’d see if we could find out a little more about them.

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It’s a fact – and we imply only correlation, not causation – that most of Scotland’s least pleasant people are to be found on the No side of the independence debate. The BNP, the SDL, Britannica, Holocaust denier Alistair McConnachie, the Orange Order and all manner of other Loyalist nasties cling to the Union Jack and a distaste for “foreigners” that they share with the most senior levels of Scottish Labour.

So far, however, it must be noted that “Better Together” has been pretty diligent about disassociating itself, at least publicly, from such groups. But as the referendum draws closer and pressure increases, it’s getting tougher and tougher to keep a lid on the nasty underbelly of the Unionist movement.

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I’d waited a long time for an official independence meeting to take place in my home town of Stonehaven, so when I read on Monday morning that Better Together (or No Thanks or SNPSNPSNPBOOO! or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) were holding just such a thing at the town hall that evening, I bounded along Allardice Street with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

Why had it taken until just five weeks before the vote to have such a meeting? I wasn’t sure. But since the Commonwealth Games I’d seen a rise in the amount of Yes signs, posters, car stickers and flags in the town. Maybe Better Together decided it was time to do something. Which side would take claim Stonehaven’s finest creation – the deep fried Mars bar – as their own?

Considering I only found out about it on the day, I thought there’d be hardly anyone there, but to my surprise the town hall was bulging with comfy chairs. Maybe two thirds were full. I felt like I was back at school as almost everybody refused to sit in the first couple of rows for fear of… well, it turned out most of these people were feart beyond belief already.

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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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It turns out that Jackie Baillie heard this and thought it was a referendum broadcast.

Silly old Jackie, eh readers?

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