Wings Over Scotland

We noticed a rather unusual story on Conservative Home on Monday. “One in five party members want Scotland to leave the United Kingdom” ran the headline above a piece about a survey the site had conducted.

In fact the title was an understatement – 22% of respondents who were Conservative Party members had answered Yes even to the somewhat loaded proposition “I want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom”.

The numbers got even more dramatic when extended to the site’s readers as a whole (not just signed-up party members), with a whopping 30% agreeing with the statement.

And obviously, there’s something quite interesting about those numbers.

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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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A Yes vote in the independence referendum would elevate Scotland to the top of the world political agenda for one reason and one reason only: the fact that the UK’s entire nuclear arsenal would unavoidably be located in a foreign country for years. Everything else about the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK – currency sharing, borders, taxation – is subordinate to that simple and critical fact.

The UK’s serious-minded and capable Defence Secretary Philip Hammond told Andrew Marr on Sunday that he “didn’t think” it was he who had told the Guardian, a couple of days beforehand, that Scotland would be able to currency-share with the UK.

You can take that any way you like, but he also pointed out that he’d just spent the week in Washington DC.

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This is the Guardian’s elaborate, deliberately-absurd April Fool story:

Ha ha! Good one!

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Better Together Parklife!

The Quiz Broadcast will be on soon. Britons should REMAIN INDOORS.

Building into a thrilling partwork!

(When we’ve done all 12 of these we’ll be compiling them into a single massive post for easy reference, but it might have been a bit much to handle in one sudden burst.)

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From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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With less than six months to go until the referendum, Scots are turning more of their attention to the debate. Until now it’s largely been the province of politics nerds such as ourselves, but with the vote beginning to loom on the horizon normal people are starting to study the issues more closely.

So we thought it’d be useful to put up a handy reference guide to the core strategy of the No campaign, illuminatingly dubbed “Project Fear” by its own staff. Lacking any positive case for a No vote as Britain suffers through austerity with no end in sight, “Better Together” has by its own admission dedicated itself to terrorising the people of Scotland into sticking with the Union:

“We’re not complacent. But nothing would please the Nats more than us dumping negative campaigning, because they know it works.”

The relentless bombardment of scare stories is so frenetic it can seem overwhelming, but it’s a lot more manageable when you realise that almost everything the No camp says is a variation on one of just 12 basic themes.

So we’ve compiled a catalogue/manual of every fearbomb in their armoury, and alongside each one is the truth that defuses it. Don’t have nightmares.

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A pretty unequivocal view from Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times, a man who knows a thing or two about how George Osborne’s mind works:

(From yesterday’s Sunday Politics.)

The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. Going (on the) underground
The tangled tale of our first advertising campaign.

2. The ad SPT don’t want you to see
The graphics of our first advertising campaign.

3. Ironic timing
A juxtaposition to our first advertising campaign.

4. The Devo Nano Policy Explosion
A post not related to our first advertising campaign!

5. The Tumbleweed Files
Crowdjournalisming.

This week’s theme: it definitely pays to advertise.

We appreciate that you’re busy people, readers, so through the miracles of modern technology we’ve actually managed to compress the entire five-minute interview between Andrew Neil and Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Portsmouth, on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland down to just 19 seconds without in any way compromising the accuracy or completeness of its content.

If you watch the whole thing we think you’ll agree we’ve captured the essence.