Wings Over Scotland

When an alert reader pointed us to a story yesterday in the comments, we were too busy to get round to covering it and now all the mainstream media has picked it up and we’re behind the times. But having looked at the media’s reporting of it, we couldn’t help noticing something strange.

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If we were you, we’d skip ahead to about 18 minutes in this video of a debate hosted by the Cupar Business Network at the start of the month. John Swinney’s oratorial skills aren’t his strongest suit, and Murdo Fraser is reading from the same “Better Together” script you’ve heard a hundred times before.

But the following hour shows Swinney where he IS at his very best. A superb debater with facts at his fingertips and a razor-sharp focus, he takes Fraser apart methodically and comprehensively, with impeccable politeness and clarity.

We’ve been tweeting a few of the most noteworthy bits throughout the day, but if you’ll forgive us for asking you to sit through two hour-long bits of media in succession, we think you’ll find this one worth it.

This site has been warning for a few months now of what lies in store for Scotland should its people vote No to independence in 2014, and in particular if Labour should defy the odds and win the 2015 general election.

Quite openly and in public, safe in the knowledge that the mainstream media (and most importantly the ever-loyal Daily Record) will ignore it, senior Scottish figures in Labour have said repeatedly that Scotland will receive a lower share of UK public spending, with the money being diverted to poor parts of England instead.

It turns out that we could have saved ourselves a load of analysis.

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We usually make several tweets about other people’s pro-independence fundraisers, but don’t post them on the main site for several reasons – chiefly that there’s always one going on somewhere, and we don’t want readers to feel unable to visit Wings without being constantly pressured to put their hands in their pockets.

We’re going to have an exception for this one, though. Jack Foster and Chris Silver created the brilliant “Fear Factor” mini-movie (as well as some shorter clips previously), and they want to step things up a gear by making a full-length film about independence in time for the referendum.

We’d very much like that to happen. Jack and Chris are the indy movement’s Adam Curtis, and we’re absolutely certain that their movie would be a fantastic piece of work capable of winning hearts and minds and making a real difference.

They need just over £11,000 in a week – peanuts for the level of quality they produce. The Common Weal fundraiser recently cleared that sort of sum in that sort of timespan, and with much less clear and visible goals, so we hope and trust that it’s achievable. Visit the site to find out more, and please help if you can.

TWO indy-positive stories in the Sunday Times? In the same week?

That needs preserving for posterity.

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It’s always nice when the Scottish media takes the time to illustrate one of our points for us. Earlier this week we attempted to distil this site’s core work of the last two years into two simple rules, elegantly pictured below.

Imagine our unrestricted delight, then, when this weekend’s Scotland On Sunday chose to generously provide us with some prima facie evidence of the phenomenon.

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At 9am today, BBC newsreader Nicholas Owen read out the headlines with the words “The Queen will lead the Remembrance Sunday celebrations – commemorations – at the Cenotaph this morning”. He was right the first time, of course.

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The raison d’être of a government is to act in the interests of their populace, yet there’s a widespread perception that they instead now exist solely to serve the political and corporate elite, sometimes with not even lip service paid to the wishes of the public.

It’s a perception backed up by hard fact in the form of opinion polls, which demonstrate that the clearly-expressed desires of the electorate are regularly ignored by all parties in favour of blind ideology, cuts to services the public value, and tax breaks for those who don’t need them.

Whoever’s in power, the assets of the nation are sold off against the will of the people, in the name of a private-sector market ideology, for the short-term profit of wealthy City speculators, and for the benefit of other countries who ironically often end up running British industries as (foreign) state-owned public enterprises.

This happens because the votes of most of the electorate don’t count for anything.

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Sometimes I can be a deeply cynical man. I get it from a couple of sources. Some is from my time as a political activist, when I learned the game in the sewer of Glasgow politics. Some is from my media degree, which taught me (to paraphrase the song) to believe none of what you hear and less than half of what your read. An education heavy on sociology, history and psychology helps too.

I didn’t grow up with this view of the world. I came to it, over time, and much careful consideration. Yet at heart I remain a socialist, and I believe that people are inherently good. It’s the systems we build for ourselves that skew the perspective, that bend our good intentions out of shape, that make us less than what we should be.

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We’ve had a go at this subject once before, but this time we’ve come up with a less hyperbolic analogy. It was sparked by another Twitter comment from Labour spin-doctor John McTernan, which cropped up last night in the middle of some truly abject cringing from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall.

.@bobby_mckail@Dungarbhan@blairmcdougall@Jenemm3 My country is Scotland.

— John McTernan (@johnmcternan) November 7, 2013

We couldn’t help but note the use of the singular.

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Here’s Johann Lamont at FMQs yesterday:

“Let me repeat: the United Kingdom Government has made it clear that defence contracts will not be let outside the United Kingdom and therefore will not come to Scotland if Scotland were outside the United Kingdom.”

And here’s the UK’s Defence Secretary Philip Hammond speaking on Channel 4 News the previous night. See how clear you think he makes that.

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We’ve only just realised that it’s our official second birthday today. (The technical one, ie when the site went live as a test with some old imported content, was last Friday, but we forgot to mark it, and today in 2011 is the day we published the first-ever post written specifically for Wings Over Scotland.)

In those two years we’ve published 1,680 posts including this one, and the thick end of a million words – 941,426 to be exact – by over 40 different authors. It’s a lot of stuff to take in, especially if you’re fairly new here. (Which you quite probably are, as nearly half of our 100,000+ readers have arrived in the last three months.)

So to mark the anniversary, we thought we’d see if we could distil most of what we’ve written in those 24 months down to just two iron rules, one for each year – in effect, producing a sort of user’s guide to the Scottish and UK media on the subject of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish independence.

We think we’ve managed it.

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