Wings Over Scotland

Some loony posted this to YouTube on Christmas Eve, so we’ve only just stumbled across it. It’s the speech given by Scotland’s Sweetheart (and Wings Over Scotland contributor), the estimable Saffron Dickson, to the Radical Independence Conference back in November, and it’s seven minutes of your life well spent.

We hope to live long enough to see her as First Minister.

The final chapter of “The Claim Of Scotland”, along with the index.

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So, Ruth Davidson’s been digging herself a big hole on Twitter since yesterday.

We’ve been trying unsuccessfully since last night to find any of these “cabernats” [sic] who’ve supposedly been “outraged” by Mr Hague’s comments. As yet we haven’t managed to locate a single tweet complaining about them. But Davidson’s remarks piqued our curiosity about what Hague had actually said, since we hadn’t yet seen the speech he’ll be giving in Scotland today.

So we went and tracked it down, and suddenly we found ourselves outraged.

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Alistair Darling double-teamed Scotland’s current affairs shows last night, appearing at length on both Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland in order to blink furiously in turn at first Bernard Ponsonby and then Gordon Brewer.

The STV man largely wasted his opportunity, spending the bulk of the interview talking about live debates, but Brewer did a much better job of putting Darling on the spot in several areas. Indeed, with the “Better Together” chairman’s very first words onscreen, the BBC interviewer drew from him a huge and fundamental lie that sits at the very heart of the independence debate. Stand back, because here it comes.

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As we were collecting stuff for the new Repository in our Reference section, an alert reader pointed us to the thing we’re about to show you, which we hadn’t seen before. It dates from 1975 but was only released to the public a few years ago under the 30-year rule – having been kept secret by successive Labour and Conservative administrations in the intervening period – until it was retrieved by Irish journalist Tom Griffin.

It’s the minutes from a discussion between some UK government civil servants on the subject of Scottish devolution, in relation to oil revenues, and what the public should be told about them. This was Westminster’s attitude to informing the electorate when even a small amount of self-determination of Scotland was at stake. Read it and ask yourself if you think the opponents of independence are being any more honest now.

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What the heck – since it’s topical, let’s have another double-header.

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Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today:

Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?

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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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