Wings Over Scotland

One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.

Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.

Today is one of those times.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Daily Record, 13 December 2013:

But phew – luckily, in the UK there’s always an alternative.

Read the rest of this entry →

We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.

We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).

Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.

Don’t they?

Read the rest of this entry →

Oh, there it is.

Click here for the fascinating full data. And when you hear Labour talk of “pooling and sharing resources” after a No vote, remember where it is that the pool’s located. Because they’ll probably be closing the one near your house.

In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.

Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.

We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.

Yikes!

Imagine working for a trade union; one which is formidable and respected, one forever being sought by Radio 4. An indomitable body of professionals who never resort to strikes and scuffles, braziers and megaphones, because they’re so heavy with influence and history that they need only tap the right minister on the shoulder to have their voice heard and heeded.

Imagine working for the magnificent British Medical Association.

When I saw the BMA were recruiting in Glasgow a few years ago I was delighted and surprised. My surprise increased when I was sent to a call centre for the interview. Sitting prim and nervous in the reception area, a tacky room with walls that trembled if you brushed against them, I wondered what this cheap and nasty office could possibly have to do with the great and august BMA.

Read the rest of this entry →

——————————————————————————————-

Amount of money saved by Iain Duncan Smith’s “benefit cap” so far:

“Around £6 million”

Amount of money wasted on Universal Credit welfare reform so far:

£120 million (or £140m, or £200m, or £425m)

——————————————————————————————-

The UK government – saving you money on welfare by 2034! (If you’re lucky.)

Whenever the hoary old story about passport checks along the border with England is dug up for another run-around (roughly once a month, as far as we can tell), the Schengen agreement usually features as the justification. Here’s a typical example:

“If an independent Scottish state were required to join the Schengen area as part of its EU membership, it would therefore have to implement the border and immigration policies required by the EU. As the UK has no intention of joining the Schengen area, this would involve border controls between Scotland and the continuing UK in order to meet EU rules protecting the security of the Schengen area.” (III 3.46)

And from there it’s only a small step for Project Fear to get to this:

“Joining Europe’s borderless Schengen area could open Scotland’s border up to mass immigration.”

This, as Theresa May knows full well, is utter rubbish. It relies, as so many of the No camp’s arguments do, on normal people’s lack of knowledge of obscure and complex laws (see also: the currency issue). So let’s cut through all the mumbo-jumbo and jargon and lay the plain and simple facts out for the record.

Read the rest of this entry →

We all know there’s something strange about Britain. Germany and China have their factories, France and Japan their nuclear power plants. America has Google and Apple and the world’s largest navy. But how is it that Britain, a country that closed its mines and shuttered almost its entire manufacturing industry, is still a major world economy?

The answer is Britain’s best-kept economic secret. It links Grangemouth, the obscene cost of housing in London, the Royal Mail sell-off, Channel Island tax havens and George Osborne’s disregard for the poor, and explains why an incomprehensible financial crisis triggered by bad American mortgages led to the closure of municipal libraries and swimming pools across the UK and a programme of permanent austerity.

And more to the point, it explains why only London, not Scotland or Wales or Yorkshire or Wearside, matters to the British political class today.

Read the rest of this entry →