Wings Over Scotland

Whatever your political views, this is a very important year. The commentators, the politicians and the so-called experts will all be heard ad nauseam – but ultimately it’s you and me, the ‘ordinary’ people of Scotland, who will decide our nation’s future.

But however Scotland votes in September, what is even more important is that the people of this country seize this opportunity to take our democracy back. For whether we’re governed from Westminster or Holyrood is almost irrelevant unless democracy – real democracy – is reawakened.

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We’re quite keen to peruse the results of this poll, which was conducted a few days ago by YouGov alongside their World War 1 one, but hasn’t yet published.

We got in touch, but the company was unable to tell us when, or whether, the responses to this question (and some others about independence, along with some on Welsh education) would be made public. It doesn’t seem like the kind of question that would be particularly useful as a piece of private polling, so keep your eyes peeled.

John Crace, the Guardian, 14 Jan 2014:

“Is it conceivable that [Sherlock] Holmes might have been a Labour voter now? Possibly. New Labour changed the rules of political engagement. What the Daily Mail still doesn’t quite get is that voting Labour is no longer a challenge to the establishment, it’s a part of it. There is no major redistribution of wealth and power for the right to fear.”

British politics: elementary.

(Now to questions typed by someone with a rudimentary command of written English.)

Because as we know “Better Together” will have quite a lot of trouble coming up with any coherent replies, we’ve had a bash ourselves while we wait for them to get started.

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This is going to be tough. Alistair Carmichael’s list of the “top 20” reasons for staying in the UK, issued today, is a document so farcical it’s actually quite hard to analyse.

It’s difficult to react to it in a rational manner, because the rational response is a torrent of angry invective at having one’s intelligence so heinously and crassly insulted. And going for the satire angle isn’t easy either, because it’s quite tricky to think of anything more ridiculous or idiotic than some of the claims the Secretary of State for Portsmouth makes. Striving as ever for balance, then, this is the best we can do.

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Yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday took a slightly strange angle on the results of a social-attitudes survey conducted by the thinktank “British Future” last month.

“Almost half of the British people believe that the UK would be weakened in the event of Scottish independence, according to the first poll to illustrate the extent that Scotland is valued by its neighbours.”

…or put another way, MORE than half of them DON’T believe that. But anyway.

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Now here’s an explosive thing to drop at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night.

Click the image to read the full Financial Times story. Did the game just change?

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Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.

The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.

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(Story 1, story 2)

…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.

“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)

So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.

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Just a wee round-up.

“Plan for Ukip ‘vote swap’ with Tories to to keep Miliband out of No. 10

Writer and Conservative campaigner Toby Young plans to launch a website that will encourage Conservatives and Ukip supporters to pledge to swap votes in margnial constiuencies”

We’re going to assume they mean “marginal” and “constituencies” there. (Even the Telegraph can’t afford sub-editors now?) But hey, it’s a comforting thought, right?

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It says something about the baleful influence of the right-wing press (not to mention Tory, UKIP and Labour politicians desperate to seek its favour) that some people in Scotland mention immigration as a reason for voting No.

Of the many scare stories originating south of the border, this one is among the least applicable to Scotland. (But is still perpetuated in the media because no major Scottish newspapers are actually owned here.) Scotland needs immigrants, and without sustained immigration over the next half century, we could be in trouble.

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