Wings Over Scotland

Can someone make years shorter, please? (January, February, March, April.)

“Comic Susan Calman has called for the end of ‘name-calling, swearing and death threats’ marring the independence debate after her satirical contribution to a radio show triggered an onslaught of online abuse.” – The Scotsman.

We’re expecting to see the evidence of these “death threats” any day now.

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Only nine to go. Dear God, what were we thinking? (January, February, March.)

“Prime Minister David Cameron will reportedly back Rangers and Celtic joining the English football league in an attempt to win the Scottish referendum on independence.” – Yahoo Sport reporting on a Sunday People ‘exclusive’. We suspect it’s a strategy Alex Salmond would have more luck with, frankly.

And so to April!

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From March 2013. (Catch up with January and February.)

“We believe that the only way forward for workers in Scotland is to ensure a Yes vote in the referendum.” – statement from postal workers’ union the CWU.

We probably need more than one quote, right?

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The best of February 2013. (January here.)

“Could we possibly not export [England’s nuclear waste] to Scotland, and then give them their independence?” – audience member on BBC’s Question Time, to much merriment among the crowd and panel.

– Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

And the respect just kept coming in February.

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79%. That’s how far into the referendum campaign we are, assuming we take the start date as 6 May 2011, when the SNP secured the historic majority that ensured the people of Scotland would be given their first-ever vote in over 300 years on whether their ancient nation should be incorporated into another.

We don’t know about you, readers, but for all the woeful bleating from the parties of the Union about the length of the debate as they woke up to the full reality of their defeat, for us it’s flown by. We can scarcely believe that nearly four-fifths of the allotted time have already passed, and as 2014 looms just a few dozen hours away we’re about to enter the final 20%.

2013, though, was the year Wings Over Scotland became our full-time job, and it would be remiss of us not to use this last bit of quiet time to take a wee glance backwards over the momentous 12 months that are just ending.

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What a week it’s been for respect. Here’s today’s Telegraph:

Maybe when you’re on holiday it doesn’t count or something.

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We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.

The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.

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As the No camp and Scottish media cycle diligently through their three favourite scare stories (EU membership-currency-border posts, round and round and over and over), they regularly alight on the one that has the most bearing on normal people’s lives.

That is, that because the current Scottish Government proposes to undertake differing immigration policies to those of the UK after independence, Scotland would “pose an open-border threat” to the rest of the UK, and that therefore you’d need to go through border checks to visit your grandpa in Penrith.

Clearly we haven’t debunked that one in sufficient depth yet, so let’s go.

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The Independent is the most English newspaper in Britain. Alone among the nationals, it has neither a Scottish edition nor even a Scottish news section. And for the vast majority of the time, it acts as though Scotland simply doesn’t exist at all. (Or, perhaps, as if Scotland was already independent and therefore none of its business.)

So it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that on the rare occasions it dares venture north of Luton, it invariably makes a gigantic ham-fisted hash of it.

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We weren’t going to post today, but we couldn’t let this one just sneak past under the cover of Christmas, because the way the story has evolved this week says so much about how the pro-Union media operates and what we’re up against.

That’s the delightful Fraser Nelson, unfathomably-accented editor of right-wing commentary magazine The Spectator and the living embodiment of our own Sir Jock Finlay-Urquhart-Duncan in his youth. A couple of days ago Mr Nelson wrote the most extraordinary leader column for the magazine, and then things unfolded.

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The official Wings Christmas card.

As a civil servant in London in the 1960s, and being part of the establishment, I always accepted the general view that an independent Scotland would not be able to survive on its own without financial help from the London Exchequer.

However, when in 1968 I was able to closely examine the UK’s “books” for myself in an official capacity, I was shocked to find that the position was exactly the opposite: that Scotland contributed far more to the UK economy than its other partners. And this, of course, was all before the oil boom.

I realised that the Treasury would wish to keep this a secret, as it might feed the then-fledgling nationalistic tendencies north of the border. I decided to keep an eye on the situation to see how long it would take for the true facts to emerge, which I felt would only be a short time. However, the machinery of Westminster, aided and abetted by the media, did an excellent job of keeping the myth about “subsidised” Scotland alive.

In fact it took another 30 years before the first chink in their armour appeared.

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