Wings Over Scotland

We got an email last night with regard to yesterday’s piece about a bizarre story in the Daily Record. We thought it was worth sharing with you. The emphasis is ours.

“I’m a lawyer and many years ago worked for the Scottish Office drafting ‘exchange cover’ contracts to deal with fluctuations in the value of currencies between parties from different countries. Sometimes the contract dealt with Swiss Francs, sometimes Deutschmarks or US Dollars and so on.

From what you have printed in your article, it seems that this is not such a contract but it does the same job another way. It makes the person sending the invoice (the contractor) send all their bills to the Scottish Government in one currency only – the pound Sterling. It also provides that they will only receive payment in Sterling. 

In other words it’s an affirmation of the use of Sterling now and in the future by the Scottish Government. I don’t know who the ‘top’ lawyer alluded to is but he or she is talking mince.

Regards, 
George Gebbie
Faculty of Advocates.”

(“Mince” is an obscure legal term. You wouldn’t understand.)

As we’re a day behind due to Saturday’s technical catastrophe, and Chapters 12 and 13 of “The Claim Of Scotland” are unhelpfully titled, let’s give you a wee bonus and have a double helping of could-have-been-written-yesterday 46-year-old history.

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Whatever your political views, this is a very important year. The commentators, the politicians and the so-called experts will all be heard ad nauseam – but ultimately it’s you and me, the ‘ordinary’ people of Scotland, who will decide our nation’s future.

But however Scotland votes in September, what is even more important is that the people of this country seize this opportunity to take our democracy back. For whether we’re governed from Westminster or Holyrood is almost irrelevant unless democracy – real democracy – is reawakened.

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Gah. Why is it that any time we’re ever vaguely nice about the Daily Record in public, they immediately pull an idiotic stunt like this and make us look like chumps?

Watch and marvel, readers, as a headline disintegrates in front of your very eyes.

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It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.

So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.

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The only way never to be caught out, it’s said, is to always tell the truth, because then you never have to worry about remembering which lies you told to who. And since we’d be lying if we told you that we weren’t enjoying watching the No campaign’s catalogue of falsehood beginning to turn in on itself, as one lie attacks another, we won’t bother.

The UK government’s dramatic debt announcement this week may have marked the opening of the floodgates. Because, to complete this appalling car-crash of mixed metaphors, the whole rotten edifice is starting to crumble down about their ears.

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Our undercover mole in the No campaign got in touch last night to apologise for the fact that he hadn’t sent us much recently. It turned out he’d been hastily despatched to foreign lands to supervise the setting up of “Better Together Moscow”. But he managed to smuggle its first piece of work out to us inside a diplomatic bag.

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This is hereditary Westminster Labour MP Anas Sarwar in yesterday’s Evening Times:

“Now, it’s been said by some that there is no passion in the case that we are better together as part of the United Kingdom.

Well, the people saying that obviously haven’t been at any of the rallies I have been at across Scotland, and where I spoke about an idea much bigger than independence; the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK for the benefit of everyone in the UK.”

Hang on – “rallies”? Were we watching the wrong channel when we missed the tens of thousands of people packing the streets for the Great Rally Of The Union? Were we passed out in a cupboard for the whole time when the Anas Sarwar Evangelical Roadshow filled football stadia in every corner of the land with crazed disciples waving Union Jacks and chanting “POOL AND SHARE! POOL AND SHARE!”?

Rallies? What on Earth is the truth-averse wee twerp talking about? We need a doctor.

Chapter 11 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

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…about the shameful, despicable sectarian comments by TV celebrity and occasional politician George Galloway in an Edinburgh Evening News article today, about how he’s been refused permission by West Lothian Council to put on his anti-independence “Just Say Naw” roadshow at a municipal venue in Livingston.

But then we kept reading, because we don’t like to go off half-cocked without getting the full story, and were richly rewarded for our effort by a magnificently deadpan line from the paper’s reporter. We’ve unsubtly bolded it for you below.

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A must-view for those of you who missed last night’s Scotland Tonight. Watch and marvel (mainly from 2m 28s) as a man falls apart in front of your eyes, reduced to a babbling, incoherent shambles by a calm, eloquent gent in a sharp tweed suit.

Our favourite bit is the desperate, plaintive “Just ask Alistair Darling!” at the end.

(Now to questions typed by someone with a rudimentary command of written English.)

Because as we know “Better Together” will have quite a lot of trouble coming up with any coherent replies, we’ve had a bash ourselves while we wait for them to get started.

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