Wings Over Scotland

As a Scot who’s made their life happily in England for the last 20 years, and also as someone on the liberal half of the political spectrum with friends and acquaintances of a predominantly similar persuasion, there’s a sentence I hear more frequently than any other with regard to politics: “I wish we could vote for the SNP too”.

But it’s not just the material things – the free tuition, the free prescriptions, the free care for the elderly (and the abundance of lovely natural resources) – that my much-beloved and cherished English pals envy.

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I originally wrote this piece for a website recently set up by some Labour MPs and MSPs from Scotland, which had solicited contributions from supporters of other parties. The site had attracted a large amount of comments (almost all of them genuine attempts at discussion, rather than jibes) from non-Labour voters, but some readers got very huffy about this “cybernat invasion”.

Sadly, despite asking me to write the piece after I suggested it to them, they’ve declined to publish it, and the site has now taken to deleting comments from non-supporters wholesale. (I had a minor Twitter scuffle with the Labour MP behind the site last night, and he’s turned out to have a very thin skin. One of his posts on the blog was also so mercilessly shredded for inaccurate facts that its entire comments thread has now been deleted.)

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“…put out the streamers/It’s gonna be a good day for the dreamers.”

I don't know, because I'm not going to count them. But if the latest opinion poll is correct (and it's a big "if"), the electoral map of the Scottish Parliament is going to look rather different in two weeks' time:

65 seats are needed for a majority in the Parliament, and the Greens support an independence referendum, so if these figures are accurate the possibility of Scotland seceding from the UK will suddenly get an awful lot more real. And a Tory-led government in Westminster has already seen support for independence surge by almost 50%, to level pegging with those opposed to it.

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Many, many caveats, of course. And a long spoon is clearly required.

But it's hard to class this as anything other than a significant victory. The Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in Scotland, and while it's unlikely to have much direct influence on how people vote, it changes the atmosphere of the election considerably. Game on.

It’s been called the “me-too” election. The Scottish media is full of the widely-repeated wisdom that three of the four main parties contesting the imminent Holyrood poll (the other being the Tories, who nobody votes for in Scotland anyway) have triangulated (ie stolen each other’s policies) to such an extent that there’s almost nothing left to choose between them on ideology, and the election is now just a personality contest.

(Which is tough on at least two of the parties concerned, since their leaders in Scotland have no detectable personalities.)

But is it true?

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Not least because I essentially don’t give a shit about the environment. (The result depicted in the image below is from Scottish Vote Compass, and my non-Scotch chums might find it interesting to take the test too.)

I do believe human activities are causing global warming, and that we’re rendering the planet incapable of sustaining human life at a terrifying rate – via greenhouse gases, pollution and overpopulation – to the point where mankind could in my view have well under 100 years left of anything recognisable as our current lifestyle. It’s just that I think that’s a good thing.

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Pictured below: Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and the leader of Labour's MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, Iain Gray, at a campaign event earlier this week.

Have you spotted it?

"Interview body language experts agree that the less you move your arms and hands about the more confident and in control you are."
– On Using Body Language During Interviews

Non-Scottish readers probably don't know who this man is. You're missing out.

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(Click for full size)

I especially love the line about "plunging Scotland into darkness for half the year", as if what our arbitrary human clocks say actually makes any difference to how much daylight there is.

These are really quite something.

Posted mainly as an excuse to link to Newsnet Scotland, which is vital ongoing reading for anyone with any interest in events in North Britain generally, in the case of the "Lockerbie bomber", or simply in the BBC's increasingly open disregard of the impartiality laws which are supposed to govern its conduct.

Next time, it could be your voice that's silenced. Remember, Cameron and Brown didn't want the Lib Dems to be allowed in the debates either.