On the eve of Wings Over Scotland’s 2000th post, we thought we’d celebrate.
Because today we learned something strange.
It seems that today marked the official start of the much-vaunted “lovebombing” campaign aimed at persuading Scots to stay in the UK by showing them how much they’re loved by the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The opening salvo did some unfortunate and costly collateral damage, but luckily the Union had a white knight following close behind to smooth over any injured feelings.
Would you like to meet him, readers?
The Sun’s editions on both sides of the border today go in heavy with the results of a YouGov poll showing a dramatic turnaround in the percentage of English (and Welsh) people who want Scotland to leave the UK.
Or at least, SOME of the results.
It’s not as if the Financial Times doesn’t have history with dropping great big payloads of high explosive into the middle of the independence debate late on a Sunday night. But a piece coming up in Monday’s edition (and online tonight) is going to choke a few breakfasts in London tomorrow morning.
It takes some doing to make even BBC News presenters look a little uncomfortable at the sheer depth of your ignorance when it comes to Scottish independence, so we probably ought to offer some sort of commendation to this guy:
Poor Anas Sarwar. He just can’t get anything right.
Doing his best to join in with the Daily Mail’s month-long witch-hunt, Labour’s “deputy” leader in Scotland leaps on an abusive and disturbingly racist-looking comment aimed at him. It’s nasty all right. It could well qualify as “hate”. But who’s it from?
So we’ll just leave this here:
And then we’re off to bed.
[EDIT: Story confirmed with Jessica Bridges at Ladbrokes press office.]
The media is positively jumping with analyses of Mark Carney’s much-anticipated speech about currency unions, with thousands of words being expended to discuss something we’ve already summed up accurately in eleven. It’s almost comical to watch the amount of anti- (and very occasionally pro-) independence spin being put on a text which went pathologically out of its way not to make any kind of judgement whatsoever on the subject.
(Something Carney continued to do at the post-speech Q&A with journalists, at which he frequently looked bemused as a series of political hacks asked him massively leading questions along the lines of “So, you said X…” which he then had to wearily but firmly point out he hadn’t actually said at all. If you click the image below you can listen to an audio recording of the session.)
However much of an awful grump he is, the best, most sensible and balanced analysis (okay, the second-best after ours) is probably David Torrance’s.
Yesterday’s Telegraph contained another example of something we’ve noticed becoming increasingly common in newspapers recently where Scottish independence is concerned – the incredible vanishing story. Check out these first two paragraphs from a piece about investment in the oil industry:
Just hold on a second, there, tiger. In the first sentence we’re apparently talking quite explicitly about something that IS ALREADY happening, but by the second sentence it’s immediately been downgraded to a “risk” and a “fear” that it “will be” happening in the future. We’re used to drastic and frequent revisions of UK government forecasts, but they usually take more than a single breath to collapse.
We’re endlessly told that the oil business is “volatile”, but that’s ridiculous.
Switch the phrase “a Scottish Assembly” in the speech below for “an independent Scotland” and Alistair Darling could pretty much have made it word-for-word yesterday.
But can you tell which leader of the opposition actually did?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
