We again commend this week’s edition of the Sunday Herald to readers as 69p (for the digital version, or whatever the physical one costs in a newsagent these days) well spent on some interesting and balanced journalism.
Iain Macwhirter’s column is a particularly good read today, unusually incendiary and impeccably argued, but the thing that most caught our eye was a nice piece of investigative reporting on a theme Wings readers will find very familiar.
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Tags: vote no get nothing
Category
analysis, scottish politics, uk politics
As we noted last week, Eton- and Sandhurst-educated Sir Norman Arthur, figurehead of the No campaign’s latest high-powered grassroots fundraising drive, has a very impressive military record – Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, General Officer Commanding of the 3rd Armoured Division, General Officer Commanding of Scotland and mentioned in despatches during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.
It’s just lucky the IRA didn’t have Twitter, or things might have been different.
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Tags: smears
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):
“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”
The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.
So we can just forget about it, right?
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Tags: Andrew Leslie
Category
analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
From today’s Press & Journal, for those of you outside Aberdeen.
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Category
scottish politics, uk politics
Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail on Wall Street Journal Live yesterday.
“I would be very surprised if at the end of the day the Scots will vote for independence. It’s a fantasy, it’s a romantic fantasy, it’s fuelled by fantasy, by resentment, by all sorts of issues.”
Shall we take five minutes out from hating the English and give her a surprise?
Category
idiots, scottish politics, uk politics, video
The diagram below comes from an interesting feature in The Chemical Engineer Today, pointed out to us by an alert reader and which has a few flaws but is still well worth a browse if you have (quite a lot of) time.
But the thing giving us a wee wry smile this morning is the realisation that if Tony Blair’s 1999 grab of 6000 square miles of Scottish sea is allowed to stand in post-Yes negotiations, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the “Clyde”, “Argyll” and “Fife” oilfields belong to the rUK, while “Britannia” belongs to Scotland.
Blair’s theft, aided and abetted by Donald Dewar and largely hushed-up by the media, is no laughing matter. But sometimes you just have to appreciate a nice bit of irony.
Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve got a lot to do tonight, readers, so this is just a quick passing thought. We’re constantly told, among the endlessly contradictory stories about oil, that the biggest problem with it is that it’s running out. Production is declining, they say, and what’s left is harder and more expensive to get to and might not be worth all the bother.
We can’t be independent, then, because while we might be fine for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, after that we’ll be knackered and bankrupt. (Which assumes we don’t find any more oil west of Shetland, or in the Clyde Basin, and that we’re too incompetent to build a lucrative renewables sector in four decades, and that we weren’t able to budget for an oil fund. But let’s go with it for now.)
There’s one question nobody asks, though.
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Category
comment, scottish politics, uk politics
