Wings Over Scotland

We try very very hard not to be crude on this website. But sometimes you’ve just got to bite the bullet and point out that someone’s a completely boneheaded moron who shouldn’t be sent out for bread and milk without grown-up supervision, let alone given a senior political position in what was once a respectable major party.

Margaret Curran wants to be Secretary of State for Scotland.

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We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.

We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.

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There’s a rather horrible article by Margaret Curran in the Scotsman today. (No real news there.) It’s a combination of empty noise and ugly smears about the pursuit of independence – an attempt to engage directly with the rest of the world in our own right – being xenophobic and inward-looking and all the usual rubbish.

But we thought it might be interesting to take a look at a single paragraph, examine it forensically and see what it was actually saying. We chose one from near the end, because to be honest we’d be amazed if anyone else had actually had the fortitude to wade that far through Curran’s  plodding, will-sapping prose.

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Professor Michael E. Smith, the Chair of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, is a man who it’s fair to say knows his onions when it comes to the politics of transatlantic defence. A native of the USA who describes himself as “increasingly intrigued about independence”, he’s written extensively on EU military and security policy, and also understands the internal machinations of NATO a touch better than plebs such as ourselves or even, dare we say it, Willie Rennie.

So we were extremely delighted when he agreed to give Wings Over Scotland an exclusive interview on the subject of an independent Scotland’s future relationship with the West’s main military alliance.

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Forgive us another rummage around in our poll data, but we didn’t do a lot of study into gender differences in our first wave of analysis, and we were struck by something this morning as we idly browsed through the question about what Scots were scared of.

Along with the fact that women were almost twice as likely – 38% to 22% – to be undecided about their referendum vote* as men (and indeed about most other votes), it was one of the areas where the differences between the sexes were most stark.

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Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran is quoted in the Herald today presenting the award of £300m of contracts for the navy’s innovative new aircraft-free aircraft carriers as a benefit of the Union, and continuing the well-worn scare story that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards would close in an independent Scotland.

We’ve already dealt with that particular canard, so instead let’s look at the sums.

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Even moderately alert readers will recall our expressing slight concern on Saturday at the recent disappearance of a page from the Scottish TUC website, in which the trade-union organisation outlined its view that the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system would result in a net loss of thousands of jobs in Scotland – a position which is strongly at odds with that of the Labour Party.

So we were relieved to be contacted on Sunday evening by the STUC’s Deputy General Secretary, Dave Moxham, who confirmed that the Congress’s opinion hadn’t changed, and that its full analysis could still be found here.

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Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:

“Prof Jim Gallagher understands the intricacies of picking and choosing powers to be devolved. He was secretary of the Calman Commission, whose recommendation formed the basis of the Scotland Act, and has co-authored a book about what will happen after the referendum.

According to Prof Gallagher, the idea of Scotland winning some version of ‘devo max’ in the aftermath of a no vote is fantastical. The term as understood by most people is ‘just independence light’ and will never be accepted by Westminster.”

Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.

As we’ve already noted today, Wings Over Scotland has the internet’s most excellent readers. Two of them have been working together over the last week or so, after we put them in touch, to share some fascinating Scottish history with the rest of us.

Click the two images in this post for an intriguing hour-and-three-quarters.

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While the Scottish print media continues to almost totally blank our Panelbase opinion poll, it’s nice to know that they’re nevertheless paying close attention to its findings.

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On the subject of Trident, which we more or less were, here’s an interesting thing.

It’s a page from the Scottish TUC website. Or at least, it used to be.

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We’ve already noted part of Willie Rennie’s appearance on Newnight Scotland this week, reinforcing the strange phenomenon by which the Unionist parties continue to suggest that an independent Scotland would be a dictatorial state more reminiscent of Zimbabwe than a modern western democracy with a proportionally-elected parliament.

But the full transcript of the segment (provided by our excellent and much-valued new transcribing department) adds a little meat to the bones. It’s fascinating stuff.

(NB YOUR PARAMETERS OF “FASCINATING” MAY VARY.)

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