Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been wiping tears of laughter from our eyes most of this morning, after reading one of the most magnificently bare-faced and audacious pieces of black-is-white lying we think we might ever have seen printed with a straight face in a British newspaper.

It appears in the Telegraph, which seems to have positioned itself latterly as the Daily Sport for people with a reading age above seven, and makes the mindboggling claim that “Contrary to its media image, the campaign to save the United Kingdom says it has more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents”.

In fairness, it doesn’t actually say whether these boots have any feet in them.

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Well, that was odd. No sooner had we posted a rather lightweight little piece this morning, revealing that the fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” campaign had been in development since June 2012, than the story got a whole lot more interesting.

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The fact that the millionaire-backed fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” group arrived on the referendum scene with so little warning got a bit stranger yesterday with the news that the “unpolished voters” campaign has been gestating for almost two years.

Alert readers will recall that Acanchi is the London PR company run by Malcolm Offord and Fiona Gilmore, the directors of VNB. And it seems they’ve been busy.

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Labour’s Douglas Alexander got himself in a right old pickle this weekend, at first claiming that the party’s new campaign around a poster about VAT referred to an annual bill of £450 for the average family, but then trying to backtrack in a panic and claim the sum was calculated over the entire period of the coalition government when it was pointed out to him that the figure was ludicrous.

Wings Over Scotland is of course dedicated above all to keeping the record straight, so our sinister network of shadowy cyber-agents got straight onto the case.

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Today has seen the entry into the independence debate of the magnificently batty Vote No Borders campaign group – not on any account to be confused with the No Borders campaign group, whose aims are to “struggle against borders and immigration controls and strive for freedom of movement for all” and are therefore the very antithesis of what the British state has increasingly come to stand for.

Various puff pieces in the media have given the group free space to advertise themselves as a “grassroots” campaign that is non-party political. But the funding figures mentioned – £150,000 raised before the group had any kind of public profile at all and hope of raising another £250,000 on top – may well cause more cynical readers to detect a somewhat piscine odour.

As we’ve got our journalism hats on, let’s have a sniff.

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Yesterday, we discovered a rather curious anti-independence “listicle” on the popular viral-meme website Buzzfeed. Entitled “Scotland. The UK. 10 Myths. 10 Facts.”, it describes itself as “myth busting” by an author identified only as “YouDecide2014”.

It was shared or retweeted by a variety of Conservative Party special advisers, the 10 Downing Street Facebook account, and even the UK Ministry of Defence.

The crude, extremely biased article gives no indication that it’s written by the UK government. The closest it comes to doing so is right at the end, where it says “Get the facts at www.gov.uk/scottishreferendum“. The Buzzfeed account page makes no reference to the UK government, and the layout makes the piece look like any normal article on the site, although in fact it’s posted on Buzzfeed Community, which is an area where users can post anything they want to without censorship.

We decided to find out more.

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We honestly don’t understand how anyone with electricity in their house or a newsagent anywhere within a 30-mile radius can possibly come to say things like this:

“[Independence] is a view not shared by IT teacher Elaine Coates, originally from Glasgow but now in Tettenhall. The mother of three has lived in England for 30 years but has no strong views on independence.

‘I just don’t see how it will work, I think Scotland would be crazy to do this,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t have any oil so how is it going to get its income? Whisky and tourism, probably, but that’s it.'”

Firstly, Elaine, we’d have to say that “it would be crazy” DOES actually sound like quite a strong view on independence to us. But in all seriousness, leaving all snark and sarcasm aside, how on Earth does a human being living in the UK in 2014, seemingly not inside any sort of secure institution, come to believe something like that?

Ms Coates isn’t some lone madwoman. Other people, also not resident in mental hospitals, say the same thing. And we get that lots of people aren’t into politics. But when it comes to ignorance about your own nation, being unaware that Scotland has oil is somewhere on a par with not knowing that Great Britain is an island. How in the world do you go through decades of adult life without ever picking up on that fact?

It’s not a rhetorical question. Can someone actually explain it to us?

As far as we’re aware, “the largest arts festival in Europe” (indeed, the largest arts festival anywhere in the world) is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Does anyone remember Ian Murray MP being in charge of it?

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Sorry, folks, but it looks like we’re going to have to do this all over again. In the light of last night’s bizarre revelations about Scottish Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals, even the barest semblance of coherence in the party’s plans has disintegrated, with Coatbridge MP Tom Clarke flatly contradicting the form letters sent out by numerous other MPs and MSPs over the last few days.

So once more we may have to ask you to drop your elected member another wee line and see if we can’t get this properly cleared up once and for all.

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The mystery of the alleged vandalism attack by “Yes supporters” on the office of Labour MP Ian Murray in Edinburgh this week has turned into quite a labyrinth.

We rang Mr Murray’s office this morning, speaking to a nice chap called Stuart (or Stewart, we forgot to ask), who declined to elaborate on the nature of the alleged vandalism but told us that Mr Murray had seen our story and would get back to us.

Below are the questions we’ll be trying to clear up.

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“Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling is in today’s Telegraph, yet again demanding that people should be prevented from expressing opinions on the internet, unless those opinions are supportive of the Union. In Mr Darling’s world, businessmen should be permitted to try to frighten their employees into voting No with mad, untrue rants and veiled threats that they’d be voting themselves onto the dole, but anyone responding to the threat with “Shut up, grandad” must be censored and silenced.

So far, so ho hum – if Unionist politicians are whining about “cybernats”, there must be a Y in the day, is the general rule. But as we can see above, the former Chancellor wasn’t the only Labour MP bleating about terrible Nat bully boys today.

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We’ve had a second response from a Labour elected representative to a reader, regarding our six simple factual questions about the party’s “Devo Nano” proposals for the Scottish Parliament. This one’s from Richard Baker, regional MSP for North East Scotland and Labour’s former Shadow Finance Secretary.

We were extremely surprised by its contents. You can read the reply, stripped only of two paragraphs of introductory waffle about Keir Hardie, below.

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