Wings Over Scotland

The pitch:

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We’re off to watch the Scottish Cup semi-final now, so to keep you all entertained for the next couple of hours here’s a little something we put together at the request of columnist and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, and for anyone who was listening to Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” this morning.

Hopefully we won’t need it ourselves by 3.30pm. #COYR

Even Sparta’s mythical iron-bar currency – specifically designed, so legend had it, to shackle the economy by being too heavy to buy or trade anything – was marginally better, in Alistair Darling’s view, than anything an independent Scotland might be able to use for money, all of which will lead to inevitable doom.

Because Scotland, as all good unionists know, is the only country in world history for which there is no currency option that will work at all.

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Have you seen the film of the coronation? I’m not talking about the grand televised extravaganza in Westminster Abbey with the young Queen Elizabeth done up like a wedding cake – I mean the Scottish coronation, in Edinburgh, three weeks after the glamorous London ceremony of 2 June 1953.

It’s not easy to locate. You’ll struggle to find a picture of it, or even a documented reference – a brief casual mention squeezed in right at the end of this article on the monarchical website is the best we could do.

Acting on the advice of her ministers, Elizabeth attended the ceremony dressed in an ordinary coat and hat. The honours of Scotland were presented to her, and she held them as if they were volatile explosive devices, standing stock-still until they were taken back again by be-gowned flunkies. 

There would be no actual official crowning. It might give the natives ideas.

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Dear Scottish women,

It seems that we’re letting the side down a bit here. If the same percentage of us were willing to vote Yes as the men, we’d be home and dry come September 18th, living in a nuclear-weapon-free democracy for the first time in our lives. But it seems like a lot of us are either not convinced or haven’t begun thinking about it yet.

I don’t believe it’s the former: anyone genuinely looking at the arguments, not to mention the behaviour of those on both sides of the debate, could hardly fail to be convinced that independence is a good thing. So I’m guessing it might be the latter.

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We didn’t do a stats post at the start of April (still just under 4m pageviews a month, if you’re curious) but when someone tweeted these figures this morning we thought they were worth a wee toot, because they’re more than just nice news for us.

They’re from the independent web-traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and they detail the relative rankings for the seven biggest dedicated Scottish politics sites on the web.

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The last batch of data from our Panelbase poll concerns social attitudes, away from directly party-political issues. We did a whole bunch of these last time, with a mixture of predictable and unexpected results, and Scots had a surprise or two for us again.

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It’s late, but we couldn’t let this one pass.

Heavens, where do we start?

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We’ve had these sitting around for a few days without getting round to posting them, but as we’re currently knee-deep in the last tranche of data from our Panelbase poll, it seemed as good a time as any to clear the decks.

First up in the ambiguously-named Posterotron is the “respectable” face of British nationalism, in the form of UKIP European-election candidate David Coburn.

Easy, ladies.

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There’s a wonderful opening paragraph in today’s Courier that we’ll quote in full:

“The UK’S Energy Secretary has accused the SNP of employing ‘negative politics of fear and bullying’ as he warned bills could rocket by as much as £189 a year in the event of independence.”

That virtuoso display of Olympic-class irony from Mr Davey was part of the latest fearbomb from the No camp – Nick Clegg’s plea for a “Sunshine Strategy” apparently having been a casualty of Lord Robertson’s “cataclysm” – in the shape of yet another “Scotland Analysis” report from the UK government insisting that every single aspect of Scottish independence would be comprehensively and unequivocally disastrous.

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With the Scottish Parliament on a two-week break, it appears to have fallen to the Telegraph to take on the role of Johann Lamont this Thursday.

Scottish Labour’s regional manager has recently been under the curious impression that the most pressing issue on the minds of the people of Scotland is the fine detail of the First Minister’s hotel bill during a trip to America to promote the Ryder Cup in 2012, and the Telegraph seems equally obsessed.

But that dramatic splash isn’t quite what it seems.

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