Wings Over Scotland

EXCLUSIVE! Keen-eyed viewers will have noted that our shadowy agents buried deep in the heart of the No camp have already managed to bring you two sneak previews of the Better Together" campaign posters which will soon be appearing on lamp-posts, walls and billboards all across Scotland to explain the benefits of unity. We're delighted to reveal today that they've smuggled several more out of No HQ under cover of darkness, enabling us to help you be prepared for the debate. Here's the first.

More on the way throughout the day.

We couldn’t agree more. (Click to enlarge image.)

The official launch of the Yes campaign for the independence referendum takes place tomorrow. We imagine it’ll be a substantial and considered affair. But what it will amount to over the next two years is nothing more and nothing less than the image below. Obviously we can’t do art for toffee, but you get the general idea.

We’ve gone on at some length on this blog (and elsewhere) about how the referendum isn’t for deciding whether Scotland is a republic or a monarchy, whether we’re in or out of NATO/the EU, whether we use the Euro or the Pound or something else entirely, how many ships we need in our navy, which taxes we’ll raise and/or cut, or any of the rest of it. The purpose of the referendum is to decide one thing and one thing only: who elects the future governments of Scotland.

The five counties of South-East England (Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Essex and Greater London) are home to just under 14 million people, compared to the fractionally over 5 million of Scotland. Even if we take Greater London out of the equation, the other four still add up to a population a million higher than Scotland’s.

Those four counties voted so overwhelmingly Conservative in the 2010 general election that they returned 62 Tory MPs from 66 seats – enough Tories alone to outvote the entire bloc of Scottish MPs of all parties (which will soon be even smaller, falling from 59 to just 52). Greater London, despite its large concentration of extremely poor urban areas, still returned another 28 Tories, along with 38 Labour and 7 Lib Dems.

So in the South-East as a whole, even including the huge relative Labour stronghold of London, that’s 90 Tories to 38 Labour, plus 11 others – an overwhelming majority of almost two to one even if you count everyone else as anti-Tory. (If you count the Lib Dems alongside their coalition partners, it’s an even more terrifying 100 to 39.)

But really, the picture tells the story for itself. A small, overwhelmingly Tory corner of England vastly outmuscles the whole of Scotland when it comes to deciding the UK government. (The dark shaded area supplies almost a quarter of all the MPs in the Commons.) We can either face the reality that we get whatever government Kent and Sussex and Essex and Surrey want, or we can choose our own. However much the desperate Unionists try to muddy the waters, it really is as simple as that.

Maybe you’re a Hearts fan (or a Chelsea one), and you’re not sure whether you’re still a bit drunk and imagining things or not, so allow us to clear something up for you.

No, you’re not dreaming. This actually happened. Tragically, this is really the picture that Scotland’s LEAST moronic newspaper thought most appropriate to illustrate their story on the imminent launch of the “Yes Scotland” campaign. (And, indeed, as the front-page lead of the entire website.) We’re not joking. We imagine the Daily Record is lining up Russ Abbott in a Jimmy hat and Rab C Nesbitt even as we speak.

We seriously can’t imagine how ashamed anyone with even the last shred of an ounce of conscience who works for the Herald must be today. Please, readers – don’t berate and chastise these poor, fearful souls. Take pity on them, for their dignity is ruin’d.

Is this actually worse than bags of peanuts with "WARNING: MAY CONTAIN NUTS" on them and the like? In some senses, I think, it might be.

Since we’ve already been nice to a journalist today, it seems only fair to also send out a little bit of love to the press corps’ less-celebrated and much-maligned brothers in arms – the photographers. (We don’t know why we’re being so pleasant to everyone all of a sudden. We think someone may have slipped something in our tea.)

Rangers FC has been in administration since Valentine’s Day. That’s three long months in which the story has featured in the news pretty much every single day, and it’s not a situation that lends itself particularly well to illustration. One picture of a Duff & Phelps press conference looks much like another, and once you’ve knocked out the traditional broken-club-crest it starts to get tricky to find a fresh visual angle.

The nation’s photo-journalists have risen heroically to the challenge, though, and we feel irresistibly compelled to take a moment out from our day to offer them a heartfelt and genuine salute, before whatever this stuff is wears off.

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You don't even need to be a particularly alert reader to recall WoSland's worrying piece about recession-hit Bath just a few weeks ago, which drew thousands of viewers from all corners of the net to become one of the all-time top 10 most popular posts on the blog. But this week, Bath's fall from grace was rendered complete.

The image above comes from a piece in Monday's Guardian about dereliction and decay in urban England (click the pic to read the story). The feature talks about northern working-class cities like Bradford, Redcar, Sheffield and Preston, particularly the various consequences (and, it posits optimistically, opportunities) presented by long-term disuse, decay and demolition of long-term empty properties. The picture chosen to illustrate it, though, is of London Road in Bath.

It's not, admittedly, the most salubrious part of town. But Bath is more accustomed to being employed to depict the grand Edwardian age in period dramas. To serve as a passable imitation of deprived modern-day Bradford instead may well be seen by the city's inhabitants as its darkest hour since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1942.