Wings Over Scotland

The Herald publishes a rather interesting story today, revealing that according to professional media analysts Brandwatch, almost three quarters of social media users in Scotland are planning to vote Yes in the referendum.

(For some reason the Herald chose to publish the piece under the headline “Davey doubts Scotland will reach green energy target”, which we’ll put down to the heat, and to emphasise the notion that the high level of support was “despite” the SNP.)

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Former Labour MEP Hugh Kerr in the Herald, 12 Jun 2013:

“I am on holiday in Denmark and independence is the topic all Danes want to discuss when they learn you are from Scotland. I have met no-one yet who is opposed to Scotland’s independence. One said to me yesterday: ‘Surely it is natural to want to run your own affairs, we certainly wouldn’t want to be run by Sweden.’

I have also discussed it with some former colleagues from the European Parliament who are certain Scotland would be warmly welcomed as members of all European institutions; as one put it: ‘After all, you have been members of the EU for 40 years, you are hardly going to be excluded now’.”

To be honest, readers, if Scotland votes No in 2014 our main life priority is going to be developing a convincing Welsh or Irish accent. It’d just be far too embarrassing and depressing to constantly have to try to explain it to the rest of the world otherwise.

We have a bit more respect for Professor Brian Ashcroft than most of the No camp’s scaremongers (indeed, we’ve even run an article of his on Wings Over Scotland), so we looked with interest at the latest entry on his blog yesterday, a piece with the fairly self-explanatory title of  “Has Scotland already spent its oil fund?”

It purports to examine what Scotland’s financial position would have been had it been independent for the last 32 years, in response to a Scottish Government document (which was backed up by fullfact.org) showing that Scotland had been a large net contributor to the UK over the period, but arrives at a bizarrely tangential conclusion.

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We’ve spoken before of the difficulty of empirically demonstrating anti-independence bias in the Scottish and UK media, because of the relative rarity of directly comparable situations. So today we’re pleased to see one of them present itself.

Michael Gray of National Collective recently visited Scandinavia and did a nice bit of journalism, securing quotes from a number of senior Danish politicians to the effect that an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU would be “a mere formality” and that the subject was “a non-issue”.

Good news. But how does it help us illustrate media bias?

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Oh my goodness. Our deep-cover source inside the “Better Together” HQ has well and truly surpassed themselves this time, with a leak of the No campaign’s latest poster so early that it doesn’t even have the “official” logo in place yet.

We’re in trouble now, folks.

This is getting spooky now.

Scottish Labour quasi-leader Johann Lamont at FMQs last month.

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We’ve explored the “Kinnock Factor” previously on this site, but some numbers from the latest YouGov weekly polling surprised even us today. Labour’s lead over the midterm Conservative-led government is still falling – to just 6% this time – and Ed Miliband’s personal ratings are even worse than David Cameron’s, but that wasn’t it.

You’ll probably want to click on that image to enlarge it.

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In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

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We know we go on about this, but it’s pretty important. A few days ago Edinburgh University held an independence debate which was unusually mature and reasonable in its tone (probably because of the absence of any representatives from Labour).

One of the six panellists was Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie, and one of his contributions contained a couple of notable truths, one more significant than the other.

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In the introduction to the chilling “V For Vendetta” (the brilliant comic book, not the awful movie), author Alan Moore wrote some words that have stayed with us:

“I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited and I don’t like it here any more.”

That was in 1988, and as far as we know Alan Moore still lives in Northampton. Perhaps he couldn’t think of anywhere better to go. But two pieces in today’s papers illustrate the bleak phenomenon he was talking about better than we could hope to explain, and it’s more true now than ever. You should read both of them if you want to understand modern Britain. Here’s the cause, and here’s the effect.

If you think it’s a coincidence, maybe you need to open your eyes a bit.

It’s quite difficult to construct a rational case for why an independent Scotland would need an army at all. A couple of battalions for emergencies can’t hurt, but beyond that level ground forces are something of an affectation for a small country like ours.

Given Scotland’s location, the threat of invasion is essentially zero. Only one nation has attempted to invade Scotland in the last thousand years – the sole country with which we have a land border – and we doubt that even the wildest fringes of the nationalist movement really think England would try it again in the forseeable future.

(And if they did, frankly, the biggest army we could plausibly hope to ever field would have very little chance of stopping them. Ditto Russia, China, North Korea, Guatemala, giant space dinosaurs or whoever the latest Project Fear fantasy bogeyman is.)

Nevertheless, we’re a bit confused by the dire warnings currently being issued by all and sundry regarding the difficulty of recruiting soldiers to such a force.

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