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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not sure this one really needs much in the way of explanation, but the top part refers to the democratic proportionality of the Scottish Parliament (a “dictatorship of one man” according to Mr Sarwar), and the bit in the middle illustrates the democratic proportionality of Scottish representation at Westminster.
The most interesting thing about the lies Scottish Labour MPs tell, we think, is their sheer transparency. They really do think you’re that stupid.
Joyce McMillan in the Scotsman today, as the Scottish press is finally, after three days, shamed into acknowledging what happened on Tuesday.
“What I see at Westminster now is not an alternative politics that avoids the pitfalls of nationalism, but an instinctive, backward-looking British nationalism that is even worse: a farrago of double standards about Westminster and Holyrood, and of reactionary nonsense about the nature of national identity in the 21st century, combined with a complete vacuum of progressive policy, and an instinctive willingness – on the part of the Labour Party – to side in this debate with what is perhaps the most privileged and reactionary government the UK has seen in a century.
The truth is that the tone of the No camp’s response to the independence debate has – in too many cases – been so reactionary, so negative, and so fundamentally disrespectful of the Scottish Parliament as an institution, that I now find it hard to think of voting with them, no matter what my views on the constitution.
And this, for me, is a new experience in politics – to enter a debate with a strongish view on one side of the argument, and to find myself so repelled by the tone and attitudes of those who should be my allies that I am gradually forced into the other camp.”
We’ll have more on that subject later this morning. Don’t miss it.
We’ve been delving around in the innards of some poorly-documented WordPress plugins recently, and we think we’ve finally worked out how to include polls in the body of a post rather than cramming them awkwardly into a sidebar. (You live and learn.) So as much as an equipment test as anything else, and in the light of the First Minister committing the SNP to a written constitution in an independent Scotland, we thought we’d conduct a wee snap survey.
The first thing to note is that not all of the issues below are actually matters for a constitution at all – some of them are properly party manifesto issues, to be decided regularly at elections rather than enshrined into the country’s founding principles. But since the FM’s speech specifically raised the possibility of things like free university education being made constitutional, we’ve taken a wide-ranging view and picked a dozen of the most common pressing topics of debate.
Secondly, as this site is predominantly read by those of a nationalist persuasion, any results will of course likely be skewed in that direction, and should not necessarily be taken as a representative cross-section of Scottish public opinion. But supporters of Unionist parties are encouraged to take part anyway – it’s just a bit of fun. What sort of Scotland would you like to live in?
We don’t make a habit of printing press releases at Wings Over Scotland – in fact if our memory serves us correctly, as it rather intermittently does, we’ve never done so. But we’re going to make a partial exception here by printing half of one.
It’s from a speech given by the First Minister on the occasion of yesterday’s unopposed passing of the Section 30 order by the House of Commons, enshrining the right of the Scottish Parliament to hold the independence referendum. We’ve left out all the stuff about that, though, in favour of the much more interesting matter of the FM’s comments on a written constitution for an independent Scotland. It’s an incredibly important commitment, and we welcome it unreservedly.
We’ll let him take it from there.
Ten days ago, Scottish Labour “deputy” leader Anas Sarwar issued a press release in his capacity as head of Labour’s referendum campaign, noting that “[Nicola Sturgeon] is right to say there has been a lot of negative campaigning. We will be raising the level of debate and ensuring that Scotland gets the level of debate it deserves.”
Here are some extracts from Sarwar and his independence-fearing colleagues’ contributions to yesterday’s epic House of Commons “debate” (in which one side got a little over 10 times as long to put its case as the other) on the motion giving the Scottish Parliament the power to conduct the independence referendum.
Make your own judgement as to how they did, and the level of debate they apparently consider Scotland deserves.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
