Wings Over Scotland

As our Twitter followers will know, we’ve experimentally decided to reserve Saturdays for light-hearted comic banter, as a bit of relief from the serious business of politics.

Of course, this week politics has been so absurd – from “Better Together” deciding it was Better Apart to Gordon Brown promising Scots that if they vote No he’d increase their taxes and send the money to England, and the still-ongoing Faragemageddon – that it hardly seems necessary, but we’ll stick with the plan.

With that in mind, then, it’s time for… British Loony Of The Week!

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Much of the Scottish media today is full of (mostly right-wing) commentators bleating piteously about the dreadful carnage in Edinburgh yesterday in which, um, a couple of dozen scruffy student types shouted at a silly man for a bit. Here, for example, is the usually-sane Alex Massie wringing his hands about the horror of it all in the Spectator:

“The hounding of Farage is a reminder that Scotland  – or at least Scottish politics – is not quite as generous, open-minded and tolerant a place as it likes to fancy itself. There is, it seems, a narrow spectrum of views deemed acceptable or legitimate. Anyone who falls outside that range can be ignored or, better still, suppressed.”

Suppressed? Are we talking about the same Nigel Farage?

THAT Nigel Farage, up there?

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…does this page appear in today’s edition of the SCOTTISH Sun?

Anyone got a copy to hand? We could find out, but we’d rather not hand over the 69p.

We got an email from our Prague correspondent last night, but that’s not the only thing the disgraceful pun in the headline refers to. As Michael Moore was kicked around the playground by Nicola Sturgeon in the first Scotland Tonight debate that same evening, the soggy security blanket he clung to more than anything else was the currency issue, which the No camp appears to believe is now its most powerful weapon.

It’s a two-pronged Trident, if you’ll forgive the even more tortured wordplay in that metaphor. Firstly there’s the scaremongering part containing the (empty) threat that the rUK would refuse to enter a currency union with an independent Scotland, forcing it to join the embattled Euro, and as back-up there’s the claim that if we DID get a currency union, Scotland would somehow end up getting less consideration from the Bank of England governors when it came to monetary policy than the none it gets now.

Let’s take the briefest look we can manage at both of those assertions.

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Never let it be said we don’t do balanced reporting.

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Loveable right-wing extremist Nigel Farage has been the toast of England for the last few weeks. This is what happened when he came to Scotland today.

We’re feeling very proud of our countryfolk right now.

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We should point out in advance that we’re using the word “voter” quite wrongly here. But a piece in today’s Daily Record has us beaten all ends up for wrongness.

The article’s headline, “Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri: I wouldn’t vote for Scottish Independence”, is entirely accurate – the 1980s pop star lives in London and won’t be voting in the referendum. Her reasoning, though, is a touch unexpected.

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We’re indebted to the alert reader who sent us a link to this last night:

If you don’t have time to sit through it all now, it’s an STV referendum debate – not about independence in 2014, but about devolution in 1997. In short, all the arguments and dire warnings we’re fed by Unionists now about independence were also deployed against devolution, which doesn’t in fact seem to have caused the sky to fall in.

It’s also interesting to note a BBC news story uncovered by National Collective this morning which reports a poll finding that “76% of businesses believe a double-yes vote in Thursday’s referendum would harm the climate for business in Scotland”.

While right-wing, conservative organisations like the CBI and FSB will doubtless never stop bleating about the terrible “uncertainty” of constitutional change, it’s good to see that there’s been at least some progress made in that field.

It’s come to our attention that despite all of our hard work transcribing interviews with Unionist politicians, some of our stupider readers still – incredibly – aren’t 100% clear on certain aspects of the policy alternatives the UK parties will be offering the Scottish electorate in hope of persuading them to vote No in 2014.

One such issue is Labour’s preliminary proposal to devolve income tax entirely to the Scottish Parliament, which is backed by Johann Lamont but strongly opposed by many of the party’s Westminster MPs.

Fortunately, an interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight with former Labour leader Gordon Brown eliminated any possible remaining doubts, with the sort of direct, straight-speaking approach for which the ex-Prime Minister was justly renowned.

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When we’ve been asked on a couple of different occasions why we started Wings Over Scotland, we’ve always given the same reply – to ask (and thereby try to answer) the questions that the Scottish media was dismally failing to ask on our behalf. It would be hard to illustrate that failure with a better example than what happened yesterday.

We’re not even talking about the bog-standard factory-default Unionist bias that’s seen not a single newspaper today depicting the launch of “United With Labour” as a “split” in the anti-independence movement – after a year of leaping on every single policy difference or minor spat between members of the Yes campaign as evidence of “chaos” and “turmoil” – despite the news/comedy value of an organisation devoted to “unity” and “togetherness” breaking into splinter groups just months into its existence.

We refer to something much more fundamental – basic journalistic competence.

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BBC News, 2.53pm today:

“Organisers of the ‘United With Labour’ campaign say they’re arguing for a fairer, better Scotland that stands strong within the United Kingdom. They’ll work with the ‘Better Together’ campaign run by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.”

Our emphasis, as ever. Poor old Alistair Darling. Where was he, anyway?

(Full package here.)