Wings Over Scotland

It’s been several months since we last did a major reader survey, so we’d quite like to poke our noses in again and get your views on a few issues that we didn’t ask about last time, as well as learning a little more about you personally. Some of the questions are directly relevant to the constitutional debate, some aren’t – we’re just curious. Feel free to skip any you’d rather not answer. As if you needed us to tell you that.

(NB All votes are anonymous, in case that’s important. We have no way of knowing how any individual reader voted on any question.)

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Readers may recall how back in January of this year we highlighted a truly horrible piece by tribal Labour dinosaur Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, where in reference to the current grotesque condition of the UK he wrote “No campaigners must publicise the fact that this is as good as it gets, and win votes by emphasising that reality”.

Ian Bell in the Herald today reports some figures from the latest research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, an organisation comprising analysts from six major universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s a sample:

“More than 30 million people “suffering some degree of financial insecurity”; close to 12 million “too poor to engage in common social activities”; around four million children and adults who are not properly fed; around 2.5 million children in damp homes; around 1.5 million children “in households that cannot afford to heat their home”.”

This, we’re told even by Labour in the No campaign, is the best the UK can ever hope to deliver. In their own words, the Union can offer us nothing better than that, and almost certainly worse still in the future. Is there anything else to say?

This week’s papers had a story about ‘cybernats’ posting rude messages on social media about Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s opposition to Scottish independence.

For the uninitiated, ‘cybernat’ is the term used in Scottish politics to refer, ostensibly, to slightly mad old-school nationalists who post vile, personalised attacks on their political opponents. Some politicos in Scotland don’t seem to understand, though, that this attack doesn’t really work as a political device as it seeks to apply a pejorative to the SNP when everyone knows it can be applied to some supporters of all political parties. Take a look at the comment pages of any UK newspaper.

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From the one-man gaffe goldmine that is Central Ayrshire Labour MP Brian Donohoe:

We do sympathise, and not just with the unfortunate (but alert) constituent of Mr Donohoe’s who sent us this recent press release. It can’t be easy for poor Brian either, constantly having to remind himself “Commemorate… not celebrate. Commemorate… not celebrate” like a low-rent version of Viz’s immortal Eight Ace.

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When UKIP’s Nigel Farage was recently made rather unwelcome in Edinburgh, a whole slew of Unionist politicians and commentators – most notably Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie – took to the nation’s airwaves and newspaper columns to piously condemn the protestors who peacefully but loudly voiced their disapproval of Farage’s policies. Angry online No supporters, as is their wont, were less measured in their fury at the “suppression” of Farage’s free speech.

Today, the subject of the media’s blanket outrage – there are sizeable stories in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, The Times, Express and many more – is the saintly British Olympic cyclist, Sir Chris Hoy. The unfortunate sportsman has been the subject of what the Mail calls “vile abuse” for some comments in yesterday’s papers in which he ostensibly refused to take sides in the independence debate (but in reality could barely have made his position any clearer).

But another similar (and rather more serious) story, about online abuse directed at a Scottish public figure every bit as well known as Hoy, inexplicably gets only a microscopic fraction of the coverage.

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There’s a story in the Herald this morning that wouldn’t normally come within this site’s remit, dealing as it does with a specific aspect of Scottish Government policy unaffected by independence. It reports a Celtic fan acquitted under the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act after admitting singing a pro-IRA song at a game between the Parkhead club and Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

For reasons we must confess ourselves puzzled by, a great swathe of the Scottish commentariat, on all sides of the constitutional debate, has set itself against the OB(F)A, apparently in the belief that existing laws had done such a good job of eliminating Scotland’s sectarian problem over the last 100 years that there was no need for additional action.

We expect this case will be used as further ammunition for their criticisms of it. But there’s a crucially important line buried three-quarters of the way down the piece.

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A FOREIGN POLICY

Margaret Curran should know the truth
Of engaging brain before opening mooth;
Using the word “foreigner”
Like a profanity
Offends large sections of humanity.

She should know better and be more carin’

Each one of us is a Jock Tamson bairn;

To hear an apology would be divine,
But don’t hold your breath – I won’t hold mine.

It’s not the first time we’ve had to raise this subject. But as the rhetoric ramps up from an increasingly nasty and unhappy No camp, we have to ask again – just what is the Labour Party’s problem with foreigners?

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Below is a short extract from an interview between Margaret Curran and BBC Radio Scotland’s Derek Bateman on Good Morning Scotland last week.

The whole thing is very much worth a listen, but this bit jumped out.

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This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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12 months into the official independence campaign, if the mainstream media is to be believed the Yes Scotland campaign isn’t doing too well. On the few occasions when the organisation isn’t being assumed to be merely a synonym for “the SNP”, it’s to allow some comment to the effect that they are “on the back foot” or has suffered another “setback” of some kind.

To be fair, it’s not only the media who have been critical. Many committed independence supporters have expressed mixed feelings about the official Yes campaign, usually along the lines of it not being proactive enough or sufficiently vigorous is dealing with this or that. Is such criticism justified? Are the media offering a fair analysis of Yes Scotland’s management of the campaign?

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This, in case you didn’t see it on our Twitter feed, was on the front page of the Independent website this morning (and indeed still is). It wasn’t a mistake.

The piece featured the Scottish author discussing various pieces of news from the past week (the guest is different every Saturday). Topics included Ed Miliband’s suitability to be Prime Minister (or lack thereof), Stephen King’s objections to e-books, corporate tax avoidance and anonymity for people who’ve been arrested.

But while the paper chose to lead with Scottish independence for its headline, for some reason it didn’t carry a picture of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon or Blair Jenkins, nor even of Rankin himself, whose words the headline comprised.

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