Wings Over Scotland

As so insightfully predicted by Lallands Peat Worrier yesterday, the media has raced to proclaim victory for Alistair Darling in tonight’s STV debate. For our money, the only winners were the people who watched something else.

The debate was a mess – not quite as shambolic as Nicola Sturgeon and Johann Lamont’s effort on the same channel a few months back, but none of the lessons from that trainwreck were learned. Darling was angry and personal from the start, while Salmond was off-form and the strategy he adopted for dealing with the only subject Darling wanted to talk about – currency – was absolutely dreadful.

We warned back in February that Yes couldn’t just keep flatly saying “There will be a currency union” for seven months, even if it’s true, and the studio audience was deeply and audibly unimpressed with Salmond’s evasion of Darling’s repeated question, even if the tactic got old and tired when the No man was still using it an hour later.

But we’re not going to get into too much spin, because our view is partisan. The main evidence used for the hasty declarations of a “triumph” for Darling was a snap poll conducted immediately afterwards by ICM for the Guardian. But on even a cursory examination, the poll actually found the opposite of what the media said it did.

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We encourage readers to keep an eye out for the soon-to-be-released work of the Scottish Research Society. You won’t have heard of them before – they’re only three months old, with just 48 “likes” on Facebook – but they’ve already amassed some serious funds and have registered as campaigners for No in the referendum debate.

The society’s website notes that it “was formed on May 6th, under the Act of 1854, permitting Scientific and Literary Societies to be set up to inform and educate the public on social, economic and scientific matters.”

It goes on to add that “the material contained in the Society’s works, is used to provide accurate and informed commentary on aspects of the issues relevant to the question of Scottish independence. The Society is not a campaign group, but an organisation seeking to inform and provide balance.”

So that’s an interesting start.

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So everyone will believe THAT’s definitely going to happen, then.

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Ralph Topping, CEO of William Hill, in the Financial Times, 4 August 2014:

“I have spent the past six years as chief executive of a company whose 17,000 employees work in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and throughout the world. Businesses are accustomed to dealing with different tax systems and employment regulations in the countries in which they operate. This rarely causes real difficulties.

And they know that national governments tend to collaborate where there is a mutual economic interest – indeed, they expect nothing less.”

Those voices of common sense just keep mounting up, don’t they?

An alert reader was listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning when they heard something unexpected that made them sit up and take notice. It came as part of a segment on Northern Irish people living in Scotland, 45 minutes into the show, and was stated in passing as an unremarkable statistic by BBC reporter Andy Martin.

We’ve isolated it for you – click the image above to listen to the short 13-second clip. (The full six-minute piece can be found here for when it expires on iPlayer.)

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Chris Huhne in the Observer, 3 August 2014:

“If Scotland goes, it will be in everyone’s interest to have a ‘velvet divorce’, as the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia was described. A nasty and messy separation would damage both sides. London will want early certainty, and for Scotland to be an EU member alongside the rest of the UK.

The result on 18 September may rewrite history, but not geography. We will all still share the same island. Their mess will be ours, both sides of the border. So we will all have an interest not to make a mess.”

Isn’t it weird how an MP has to be “disgraced” before they can tell the truth?

Here’s an extraordinary display from Labour’s Jim Murphy, still standing on an Irn Bru crate and drawing crowds of up to a dozen people (several of whom sometimes aren’t even Labour staffers) in 100 locations across Scotland. This one’s apparently Ayr.

Not only does the former Secretary of State for Scotland spend most of his time bellowing furiously despite already being the only person with a microphone, but the demented rant he embarks on when asked a question by a lady in the crowd about Gordon Brown’s disgraceful lies over organ transplants will have readers used to Mr Murphy’s normal TV persona blinking and rubbing their eyes.

Most striking, though, is his complete refusal to meet the woman’s eye at the end of his extended “SNP BAD!” outburst, in which he’d completely ignored her simple and reasonable question. Several times at the end you can see him consciously turn away from her so as not to catch her gaze, presumably out of shame.

Vote No and trust him with Scotland’s future, readers.

The above is a deceptively simple question and one to which the answer, of course, is as varied as the people you might ask it of as we approach September’s vote.

The debate so far would suggest that at one end of the scale, we’re a nation of poor wee souls, much safer shackled to a United Kingdom that gifts us stability and security in the face of choppy global waters and saves us from the hassle of making crucial political decisions for ourselves. At the other end, we’re a proud nation of untold prosperity, a nirvana of wealth and social justice primed to emerge after our divorce from our oppressors in Westminster.

For anyone in between and still grappling with their identity, the Economist helpfully informed us recently that being Scottish means painting a Saltire on your face, wearing a Jimmy hat and shouting at nothing in particular. Glad that’s sorted then.

The truth is that very few of us will see ourselves in these broad-brushed caricatures of Scottish identity. I certainly don’t. In fact, the more I force myself to think about it, the clearer it becomes that I don’t have a bloody clue what it means to be Scottish.

Or at least I didn’t until last month.

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One of the more persistent scare stories deployed by the No campaign is the claim that Scottish higher education will be crippled by a Yes vote, thanks to the weight of applications to Scottish universities from students in the rest of the UK, who will then be entitled by EU law to free tuition, whereas they currently have to pay up to £9000 a year (with the figure set to increase).

For good measure they also claim that tens of thousands of young Scots will be “frozen out” of university education by the flood of incomers from, in particular, England. Those damn foreigners, eh?

It sounds like a solid argument. But is it?

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The UK government is about to put another taxpayer-funded leaflet through every door in Scotland, laden with dire warnings about the consequences of independence.

Boiled down to just five bullet points – one of which is the meaningless “best of both worlds” – it presents the case for the UK as amounting to keeping the pound (which Scotland can do either way), higher public spending (omitting the fact that Scots pay over the odds for said spending), jobs with UK companies (which would be unaffected because EU law demands freedom of employment) and lower energy bills.

The latter is based on the oft-repeated claim that fuel bills would rise in Scotland because the rUK would no longer pay to import subsidised Scottish renewable energy. But an article in The Ecologist this week, by two respected academics from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, blows that argument out of the water.

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