Wings Over Scotland

We must confess, we’ve never quite understood the No campaign’s longing to turn the independence referendum into one on Alex Salmond. The First Minister certainly divides opinion, but his personal ratings are consistently more impressive (and by a considerable distance) than poll figures for Yes.

The latest one we could find (from a month ago) suggests that if the referendum question was “Do you want to entrust Scotland’s future to Alex Salmond?”, the Yes side would win by an 11% margin on an 85% turnout.

So it makes stuff like this, from today’s Sunday Herald, all the more puzzling.

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Few people seem to have noticed the appearance of a new TNS-BMRB Scottish opinion poll today. After taking a bit of a savaging for their previous poll, whose sample suggested that Labour had won the 2011 Holyrood election, the company has changed its methodology to reflect reality – though it’s made little difference to the headline findings, of which the most dramatic aspect is the huge 31% figure for “Don’t Know”.

The Yes camp still needs a 10% swing to catch up, but as readers will know we place very little store by the Yes/No questions in polls this far out, with the white paper still unreleased. We’re a lot more interested in digging around in the data below the surface, and this poll has one particular nugget that caught our eye.

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Those clued-up, cutting-edge sorts among you who follow our Twitter account will have seen this last night, but it definitely needs to reach a bigger audience.

It’s a recording of a meeting held by Clydebank TUC earlier this month on the subject of whether the working class should support independence. The working class is the sector of the Scottish public whose voice is least heard in the debate (which is largely dominated by middle-class media-intellectual sorts), and perhaps not coincidentally is the demographic which tends to favour independence most strongly.

The footage is raw and often angry, and readers sensitive to adult language might wish to steer clear. Anas Sarwar probably wishes he’d done the same.

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If you’ve been waiting (as we have), here are all six episodes of Jack Foster’s superb overview of the Scottish political scene, collected into one punchy 34-minute film.

Adam Curtis would, we hope, be proud.

We’ve highlighted some truly gruesome displays of anti-Scottish bigotry on this website over the last couple of years, the large majority of them from right-wing English newspapers. But today sees perhaps the worst case we’ve ever seen, and we’re sad to report that the blame for this one lies squarely at Scotland’s own door.

We hope you have a strong stomach.

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That doesn’t happen terribly often.

But on this matter, we simply can’t find fault with her logic.

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This is the entrance to the municipal offices of Stirling Council (“Scotland’s Heart”), visible from the monument to William Wallace that looks over the former Scottish capital. The figures guarding the doorway are Wallace and Robert the Bruce.

The building’s flagpole is flying a Saltire (specifically the city’s own modified coat-of-arms version, which features a Lion Rampant and explicitly represents the Battle of Bannockburn), as you might quite reasonably expect it to.

Enjoy this patriotic sight while you can. It might have barely 48 hours left.

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As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.

He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.

As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).

Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?

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The new Scottish Secretary, Alistair Carmichael, in Holyrood magazine in 2010:

“Getting rid of the Scotland Office is a ‘job waiting to be done’, says Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, dubbing the current Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy as a ‘tax-funded campaign manager for the Labour Party in Scotland’.

In an interview with Holyrood magazine, Carmichael said that if his party got into power there would be no Scotland Office, asserting that he would instead head up a department of the Nations and Regions.

 He continued: “I think there is a job to be done but having the Scotland Office is not the right way to do it because it should be the clearing house between government in Edinburgh and government in London but now it is just a focal point for conflict.”

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.

Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.

(Click the image for the full audio.)

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As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)

His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.

If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.

To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.

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