Wings Over Scotland

Alert commuters using Scotland’s railway stations may this week have received a “newspaper” from the official No campaign containing a splendid crossword and a recipe for raspberry brownies, amongst some political rubbish.

We haven’t tried it ourselves, but we hope the recipe was a bit less inaccurate than the political sections, or a lot of people might die of food poisoning.

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As a living embodiment of the posh, braying public-school Tory-boy stereotype, Fraser Nelson of the Spectator used to reside in our “Zany Comedy Relief” links bar until we kicked him out for rarely lowering himself to write about Scotland.

But his guest appearance in today’s Telegraph we enjoyed at least parts of.

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In “breaking news” during a dull ding-dong of a debate on Wednesday’s Newsnight Scotland, we were breathlessly told that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had made an important intervention in the debate about whether Scotland should keep paying for railway lines between London and Birmingham, weapons of mass destruction and Ian Davidson’s expenses. (We paraphrase.)

Stopping just short of a drum-roll or mariachi band (yes, those are Mexican, but are you telling us BBC Scotland would know the difference?), viewers were dramatically informed that in a major new development Mariano Rajoy had said… exactly what he’s been saying for most of the last two years. 

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If you missed it, Nicola Sturgeon’s extraordinary cross-examination demolition job on Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael can now be seen on the STV website. And if you’re pushed for time and can’t spare the full 19 minutes, here’s the gist of it:

It’s been quite the week, so to celebrate smashing our all-time one-day pageviews record twice in succession, here’s a wee And Finally… bonus extra.

You’ve probably already seen this on Twitter today, after alert reader “Corstorphine Craig” knocked up an inventive graphic from some old material and sent it to us, whereupon we retweeted it and it went rather viral. But it deserves a front-page spot.

Viewers of a certain age will of course recall how well the coal mines, Ravenscraig, Linwood and Bathgate all flourished in the safe hands of the UK when Scotland was swindled out of its Assembly despite voting in favour of it.

But as the parties of the Union and their tame media fall over themselves to rubbish the sensible, achievable vision laid out in the White Paper this week, it never hurts to remember how their scare stories usually end.

Comes at 1m 43s, courtesy of the You Couldn’t Make It Up Department:

“Let’s have a debate” – Labour’s solution to all ills.

Dear Yes Scotland,

Please immediately contact Channel 5 and ask them how much they want for this:

Pay any price they ask, and show it on September 17th. 100% Yes, in the bag.

(Download links 1 and 2.)

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No, we haven’t accidentally put up this post again.

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One of Labour’s key allies in Scotland is solicitor Mike Dailly of the Govan Law Centre. Best known for his attempts to force the Scottish Government to subsidise the bedroom tax by cutting services elsewhere, he’s a venomously anti-SNP figure who rarely passes up the chance for a bit of Nat-bashing.

(It would, we’re sure, be overly cynical to suggest that Mr Dailly wants the bedroom tax propped up because if it was abolished he’d suddenly be out of the public eye.)

Today he’s published a blog angrily contesting the claim made in yesterday’s White Paper that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.

We thought we’d take a look.

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If you were at work when everything was happening this morning and this afternoon, here’s a one-stop catch-up guide to all the interesting media of the day.

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We’re still dutifully ploughing through “Scotland’s Future”, but in truth we’re not really its target audience. We’re already convinced, and much of it is just like reading our own articles back except in rather blander language. What we can definitely say for certain is that it doesn’t lack detail – the composition of an independent Scotland’s armed forces, for example, is laid out almost down to the rifle.

Naturally, that didn’t stop the No camp from rushing onto the nation’s TV screens within minutes of the press launch ending with their considered, serious and thoughtful assessments of a document none of them had read.

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Alert readers may have noticed that the Scottish Government website and the scotreferendum.com one are both somewhat besieged by traffic at the moment and struggling to load. So we’ve uploaded local copies of both the full White Paper and the summary document, in “epub” format (for tablet devices and smartphones) and PDF for reading on PCs. You can find them below.

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