Wings Over Scotland

A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.

(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)

A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.

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There’s an intriguing interview in today’s Sunday Herald with ‘Better Together’ campaign director Blair McDougall (described by the paper as a “Labour apparatchik”), to mark the anniversary of the campaign’s launch. We recommend buying the paper – our digital copy costs just 69p from PressReader – and reading the whole thing, but if you’re pressed for time the last few paragraphs sum up the content pretty accurately.

And if you’re really in a rush, the last two sentences will do.

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We’ve got quite the exclusive for you today, folks. We’re indebted to the alert civil servant who’s managed to smuggle out of Whitehall a copy of the UK government’s draft document of its inaugural greetings to the people of an independent Scotland, to be delivered (naturally) by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

Given Mr Hague’s recent comments on how “baffling” the very notion of Scottish independence apparently was, readers may find the practical behind-the-scenes reality reassuring. You can read the speech in full below.

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This is a genuine request for enlightenment, readers. Hopefully someone can help.

When we’re bored, we like to take a look at the Herald website front page and play Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline. It’s not usually too taxing a game – by way of illustration, we suspect you won’t have too much trouble with this example:

The actual story itself, though, has us bewildered.

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We should, if for nothing else, commend the No campaign for gradually learning from experience. Much hilarity ensued when it attempted to claim an independent Scotland would need to renegotiate “14,000 treaties”, and even more fun was had when it produced a list of 500 (actually 507) “questions” about independence.

So we applaud the UK government for dialling down the crazy a notch and producing another doom-and-gloom list of reasons why it would be impossible for Scotland to achieve what around 150 countries have managed to achieve in the last century or so, but which restricts itself to just a modest 200 entries.

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Viewers watching the BBC and STV’s coverage of the Aberdeen Donside by-election last night will have noticed one particular pre-prepared script get repeated airings from Labour representatives. Kezia Dugdale on Newsnight Scotland, Anas Sarwar on Scotland Tonight and others at the count all spontaneously offered a list of SNP seats which would fall to Labour were the evening’s 9% swing to be repeated nationwide.

The interesting thing about the line, though, was how little it actually said. In the 2011 Holyrood election the SNP took 45% of the constituency vote to Labour’s 32%. Last night, despite the advantages of a by-election (traditionally used to register a protest vote), a 50% increase in the number of candidates contesting the seat and the loss of an MSP who was extremely personally popular in the constituency, the numbers were 42% and 33% respectively – a swing to Labour of just 2% in a little over two years.

On that schedule, Labour will surge back to power at Holyrood at the election of 2024.

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Shall we have a Donside thread for those of us staying up to watch the result of a Scottish Parliament by-election (with some forays into Nigeria vs Uruguay in the Confederations Cup)? Why not, eh?

One last snippet from “Road To Referendum” episode 3:

“I think Alex Salmond is offering something in terms of independence, whether you like it or not. The Unionists are not offering, in my view, anything. And you can’t go into an independence poll in 2014 saying, you know, ‘We’ve been together since 1707, let’s be together for the next 300 years’. For a lot of young Scots in particular, that’s not an attractive proposition.”

That’s Henry McLeish, former Labour First Minister and still (as far as we know) a firm advocate of a No vote. The comments seemed especially pertinent this week when the two competing parties in today’s Aberdeen Donside by-election both tweeted pictures from the local Aberdeen newspaper the Evening Express, quoting vox-pops with some of their respective voters.

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We’ve noted a few times on this site that if you can judge a person by the company they keep, then the “Better Together” campaign would be an unsavoury character indeed. Backed enthusiastically by the likes of UKIP, the EDL/SDL, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order, it must be an uncomfortable place for Lib Dems and self-professed “internationalist socialists” within Labour to be living.

By contrast, the blackest sheep in the Yes family are a tiny handful of anonymous internet McGlashan sorts, daft and sometimes shouty but plainly harmless. We can’t recall any examples of Yes supporters being caught out giving Nazi salutes or calling for the forced repatriation of immigrants or the murder of Catholics, and you can be sure if there were any they’d have been all over every newspaper in the land.

So there’s a degree of irony in the newest recruit to the Unionist cause.

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Because we get really weary when sneering Unionist politicians and commentators line up continually to pretend that the Yes campaign is promising a land of milk and honey after Scotland becomes independent.

So as it’s our special “Road To Referendum” day and an apt quote from the First Minister helpfully presented itself, we’re just going to leave this here:

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Scotland on Sunday, 17 June 2013:

“[Johann Lamont] can be awful on telly. One recent encounter, in which she was asked repeatedly whether or not she favoured keeping Trident, has been transcribed on a politics blog and makes grim reading – a masterclass in prevarication, hesitation and the making of fudge.”

It’s nice to know those horrible hours of painstaking effort pay off sometimes.

The concluding episode of STV’s “Road To Referendum” was almost a one-stop repository of some of the most compelling arguments for independence. Not because of anything in the show’s own script, nor even any of the interviews with the Yes camp, but rather the contributions of the Unionist side.

Whether it was Willie Rennie’s cluelessness, Jack McConnell’s revolting attempt to misrepresent the views of a dying international statesman, Michael Kelly’s reference to the Scots as “they” or Jim Murphy’s misplaced arrogant complacency, the programme showcased some of the least attractive aspects of the anti-independence movement.

The ugliest bug at the ball, though, was the UK’s Prime Minister.

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