Wings Over Scotland

There was much hilarity on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” this morning (from 39m), as the studio guests discussed right-wing Scottish Labour MP Jim Murphy’s Daily Mail-assisted attempts this week to silence dastardly so-called “cybernats” by preventing them from attending debates or appearing on TV.

But an alert Wings reader had already noticed that Mr Murphy isn’t exactly new to the notion of attempting to muzzle those whose opinions are not at one with his own.

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Something annoyed us a great deal this week, and for once it wasn’t some fatuous statement from Alistair Darling or Alistair Carmichael or Ruth Davidson (though all of those were in plentiful supply too). Rather, it was a comment from a distinguished academic and professional in what was otherwise a good-news story.

The chap in question was Patrick Layden QC, former Deputy Solicitor to the Scottish Executive (as was), prior to giving evidence to Holyrood’s European and External Relations Committee, and the quote published in several papers was a troubling one.

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“Better Together” must be nearly out of green bottles by now. 2014 has seen a bonfire of the scare stories. First to go was the terror of debt, which also all but guaranteed that there WILL be a Sterling currency union after independence (because the last thing the UK government needs is to have whatever amount Scotland takes as a share of UK liabilities being denoted in a fluctuating foreign currency).

Then the warnings about EU membership crumbled from several directions at once, culminating in today’s rather low-key story in which respected expert (and Unionist) Sir David Edward dismissed the idea of Scotland being thrown out of Europe as being nonsensical and impractical, having made similar comments last week.

The latest pillar of the No campaign’s case to collapse in the blink of an eye is the much-pushed line that independence means forcing Scots to choose between being Scottish and British. But who says so?

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The front page of this morning’s Telegraph.

We can’t decide which part we’re the most proud of.

The headline findings of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey compiled every year by ScotCen are of limited use in the context of the independence referendum. The main constitutional question it asks is deeply unhelpful, with a vague, all-encompassing “devolution” option that tell us next to nothing about how Scots will vote.

(To be fair, that’s not the survey’s fault – it was designed long before the referendum was ever thought of as a reality, for a broader purpose, and asks the same questions every year for consistency of comparison.)

But the results for 2013 are interesting – as they always are – because they tell us what Scotland thinks when the debate is moved away from overtly political questions, they tell us where the arguments are being won and lost, and they enable us to determine just why Scots are the only people on Earth who’ve been (so far) successfully made scared of running their own country.

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It’s a start, we suppose. But it doesn’t take long for the UK government’s latest independence “fact sheet” to start telling fibs again. It barely gets a quarter of the way through its very first sentence before dropping a big old porky on those assembled:

Much as we’d like to think otherwise, there’s no such thing as a “forever decision” in politics. Whether Scotland votes for or against independence, it could change in the future. The USSR fragmented, East and West Germany reunited (having been abruptly split up after the “Thousand Year Reich” only actually managed 12), and even our own lifetimes have seen countless realignments and redivisions of states across the world.

So what else in the paper is, to use the technical term, total cobblers?

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The Herald, 4 October 2013:

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The latest in the UK government’s “Scotland Analysis” series of independence briefing papers was released this week on the back of William Hague’s visit to Glasgow.

At 119 pages, the EU and International Issues paper is nobody’s idea of a slim pamphlet, but it’s remarkably light on meaty content.

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Me, writing in April 2010, before there was a Wings Over Scotland:

“Brown doesn’t have a pig in a sausage factory’s chance of still being PM in a month’s time. So all he’s doing with this disgusting, desperate attempt to grab a few Mail-reader votes in marginals is setting a tone of contempt for the poor that the Tories will seize on, and thereby triangulate their own position to somewhere even more loathsome. God help the poor if Cameron gets in.”

Once in a while it’d be nice to get it completely wrong.

Welcome to another glorious new dawn in the Union.

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#ukok #bettertogether

We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:

“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”

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