Sent in by an alert reader from a 1971 book called “Scotland’s Scrap Of Paper”.
Same as it ever was, eh readers?
The mystery of the alleged vandalism attack by “Yes supporters” on the office of Labour MP Ian Murray in Edinburgh this week has turned into quite a labyrinth.
We rang Mr Murray’s office this morning, speaking to a nice chap called Stuart (or Stewart, we forgot to ask), who declined to elaborate on the nature of the alleged vandalism but told us that Mr Murray had seen our story and would get back to us.
Below are the questions we’ll be trying to clear up.
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.
“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.
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.
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.)
From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.)
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
