Wings Over Scotland

We owe SNP communications officer Erik Geddes an indirect hat-tip for this one, as a link he posted to something else on Twitter led us to discover this superb piece from the Herald archives. It’s from the 28th of February 1979, the day before the first referendum on Scottish devolution – the one which resulted in a Yes vote, but which was rejected on the grounds of a rigged amendment by a Scottish Labour MP, delaying the return of a Scottish parliament for 20 years.

It’s absolutely startling to read the “No” responses and see just how indistinguishable most of the dire warnings about the consequences of an “Assembly” are from the arguments against independence we hear now, and to also note how few of them (in fact, none) came true when devolution finally arrived.

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Earlier today we had a wee pop at the Herald for the headline of this story:

The reason for our complaint was what we felt to be the misrepresentation of a poll asking a multiple-choice question about the Scottish constitution:

“What clearly WOULDN’T be fair, though, would be to present those statistics as a drop in the “Yes vote”, because the SSAS’s multiple-optioned findings on an obsolete 14-year-old form of a “constitutional preference” poll bear no relation whatsoever to any “Yes/No” question that’ll be asked in 2014.”

So it was a nice surprise to later, by sheer chance while browsing around for nothing in particular, happen across the same story with a slightly different tone. Evidently the paper had listened to reasonable, fair criticism and taken admirably prompt action.

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Poor old “Better Together”. We already knew they had some difficulty with basic counting, but today it seems their reading isn’t up to much either. Desperate to deflect attention from the hideous hole they’ve dug themselves into over Europe, they’ve seized on the latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing (depending how you spin it) almost three-quarters of Scots in favour of devolution rather than independence.

There’s only one problem: the cited source for those figures doesn’t say that at all.

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We should get one thing straight from the start: the only thing on Earth more tedious than a conspiracy theorist is a conspiracy denier. For every swivel-eyed nutter you find shouting hysterically that the government and royal family are 12-foot-tall shape-shifting lizards from space, there’ll be an equally (but differently) dim-witted Pollyanna at the other end glibly sniggering about “tinfoil hats” and rubbishing the mad notion that a group of people might ever get together and covertly seek to achieve an aim.

Because the history of humanity is the history of conspiracies. From Guy Fawkes to various military coups, revolutions and civil wars to the burning of the Reichstag and right up to the present day, mankind’s records are littered with events which, had anyone actually warned of them before they happened, would have been dismissed by smug idiots as the deranged fantasies of the comically paranoid.

As recently as last year we saw one right here in our very own country, when the South Yorkshire police were found to have perpetrated a co-ordinated, decades-long cover-up over the Hillsborough tragedy. Yet like moths which keep flying into lightbulbs over and over again in the irrational hope that THIS time they’ll turn into the moon, we stubbornly refuse to entertain – indeed, openly mock – even the abstract possibility that anyone in a position of power might ever be up to no good.

So, then, to the Scottish media.

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There are some questions that are guaranteed to bring a sudden end to any internet discussion. (In real life it’s harder for people to just vanish into thin air.) One always effective on Labour supporters, for example, is the classic “Would you rather live in an independent Scotland governed by Labour or one in the UK governed by the Tories?”

Of course, more strictly speaking that’s actually a near-certain way to ask someone to choose between Option A and Option B and every time get the answer “Non-existent Option C”. Other questions, though, are sure to solicit no response at all.

Last year, when occasionally debating with Rangers supporters about whether The Rangers International PLC (or whatever it’s called today) was a new club or not, I must have asked this one at least 60 or 70 times of 60 or 70 different people: “If they’re the same club they always were, why are they in SFL 3? They were neither relegated on the field nor demoted as a punishment, so why aren’t they still in the SPL?”

I’ve as yet never had a single response – even a bad one – to that, just instant and complete radio silence or, at the best, an abrupt change of subject. And recently I’ve discovered there’s a holy water for the Tory type of vampire too.

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We’re unimaginably thrilled to bring you our very first ever official Wings Over Scotland cartoon, composed and drawn by regular reader and commenter Chris Cairns.

We feel like a proper grown-up newspaper now.

We’ve got a bit of a dodgy Freeview picture this morning thanks to the weather, but we THINK this is what we just heard on the news from all the Tories (and others) who want the UK to leave the EU, but Scotland to stay in the UK.

Thanks to many alert viewers for sending in some we didn’t quite catch.

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It’s almost too easy to take all the cheap shots that David Cameron’s much-trailed, long-awaited speech about UK membership of the EU left open.

From a Scottish perspective it was difficult to suppress a hollow laugh, for example, when the Prime Minister said of some prominent non-EU nations: “I admire those countries and they are friends of ours – but they are very different from us. Norway sits on the biggest energy reserves in Europe, and has a sovereign wealth fund of over €500bn“

It’s also tempting to simply marvel (again) at the mind-boggling witlessness of the “Better Together” campaign, who spent the final weeks of last year hollering from the rooftops about how Scottish independence might bring about the terrifying prospect of Scotland finding itself out of Europe, when they MUST have known that Cameron was about to make that same thing a far more real possibility within the UK than outside it.

(The No camp’s willingness to keep on energetically hurling hefty boomerangs at the independence movement, no matter how many come flying back and hit them in the teeth, is truly one of the wonders of the modern age.)

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We’ve raised this subject before, but it was brought to mind again by a conversation we had on Twitter last night and this morning, and it never gets any less relevant. Opinion polls are tricky things. Let’s just remind ourselves of a few:

Who do you trust to act in Scotland’s best interests?
Scottish Government: 71%
UK Government: 18%

(Source: here. Also reported in Scotsman subsidiary Fife Today, but mysteriously now completely vanished from the internet.)

Which decisions about Scotland should be made by Holyrood?
All of them: 43%
The same ones as now: 21%

(Source: here, table A1. A “devo-max” option scored 29%.)

Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes: 28%
No: 48%

(Source: here, although see here.)

Alert readers will of course have noticed (again) that these three questions are in fact all the same as each other. They all describe independence. Yet the answers are radically different. Scottish voters trust the Scottish Parliament to act in their best interests vastly more than they trust the UK Parliament. They think it should make all decisions about the governance of Scotland. Yet ask them if they want to vote to make that exact thing happen, and they change their minds completely.

There’s clearly a serious democratic disconnect here. What to do?

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One of the most unfortunate things about the Scottish media’s coverage of the independence debate is the persistent portrayal of the Yes campaign as nothing more than a figleaf concealing the SNP. Recently we’ve pointed out the unwillingness of the press to acknowledge information that’s already in clear public view with regard to the demographic make-up of the pro-independence movement, even while making great play of the alleged comparative broadness of the No side.

So we decided to conduct our own poll, just out of curiosity, on a dozen random topics. With just shy of 1000 respondents it’s a respectable sample size, and while of course it isn’t scientific (being self-selecting) it wasn’t aiming to be. The large majority of this site’s readership is of the nationalist persuasion – for want of a better term, at least – so we weren’t trying to take a snapshot of all Scotland, but rather one specifically of the Yes movement. The results were pretty interesting.

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Bless ’em, they’re getting closer. After some nagging, the Herald has now finally changed the story about jobs at Faslane that it printed a correction for earlier this week. And credit to them, the new version is a good 5% less wrong than the original.

Rather more distressingly, though, the newly-edited story still doesn’t match up even to the Herald’s own correction, never mind any kind of reality.

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An unnamed SNP spokesman on STV News:

“We have no wish to comment on Cllr Matheson’s private life. The issues which are important to the city are Labour’s scandalous £500,000 pay-off to a supposed anti-poverty boss which has been condemned by the charity regulator, the closure of day centres for adults with learning disabilities without consultation, and their incompetence over plans to redevelop George Square.”

Still, we’re sure that free wi-fi will be along any day now.