Wings Over Scotland

A brand-new scare story raised its head this week, coming in from the blind side and catching the voting public unawares with the news that Westminster has decreed that independence would see Scotland struggle to sell its food and drink products abroad.

During a visit north of the border, Owen Paterson (the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), claimed that Scottish exporters gained massive advantages from the UK government’s “clout” in markets such as China and Russia. He said an independent Scotland would struggle in comparison.

“What I see time and again after the success of the Olympics last year, the Royal Wedding and the Jubilee, is that there’s a real interest in British products… There’s a real positive for great Scottish firms like Walkers and those in the Scotch whisky industry in using the British government.

The UK is the sixth biggest economy in the world and we have real clout. When we asked that our whisky is treated fairly and ask hugely important governments in very important potential markets like China and Russia to look at counterfeiting or geographical indicators, that is to the massive advantage of that industry.

How people vote in the referendum is down to them, but I would make a very strong case that there’s a clear advantage for Scottish farmers and manufacturers to stay within the UK.”

But the minister’s assertions fall apart under scrutiny.

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Because frankly we could write 10,000 words and not say as much about the state of the United Kingdom in 2013 – and its future – as these two pictures do.

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Alert readers may recall a piece yesterday in which we highlighted the strange nature of this weekend’s Sunday Post front-page lead story. It appeared to regard the Scottish Government pursuing the policies on which it had stood for election as some sort of illegitimate guilty secret, and made great play of the fact that the Scottish Government had attempted to withhold the cost of some expert advice it had sought.

There are, of course, two protagonists in the independence debate, so it would seem only fair to examine the UK government’s conduct in preparing the reports with which it seeks to counter the Scottish Government’s documents, and the transparency thereof.

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Particularly alert readers will have noticed that this site isn’t called Wings Over Wales. Which is a shame in one sense, because “WOW” would be a great acronym to have.

But we’re going to make an exception to our normally all-Scottish, all the time agenda today, because of something that happened in the smaller of mainland UK’s sub-states about which we happen to have some personal experience, and which ties in to Labour peer Lord George Robertson’s extraordinary assertion in a debate last month that Scotland has “no language or culture or any of that”.

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That doesn’t happen terribly often.

But on this matter, we simply can’t find fault with her logic.

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As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.

He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.

As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).

Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.

Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.

(Click the image for the full audio.)

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Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.

This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.

What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?

THOSE really big banks?

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We must admit, we’re baffled by the Daily Mail’s sudden and extraordinary attack on Ralph Miliband, the long-dead father of Ed and David. If there’s any publication on Earth you’d think WOULDN’T feel on very solid ground lecturing other people on stuff they said in the 1930s and 1940s, you might imagine the Daily Mail would be it.

We can’t for the life of us work out what the right-wing hatezine thinks it could possibly have to gain from such a hysterical, vile assault, which even most Conservatives are disassociating themselves from in embarrassment.

The current Labour leader has often spoken of his rejection of his father’s strong left-wing views (indeed, he does so in the rebuttal the Mail has, albeit with the greatest of ill-grace, published today), so goodness knows what the paper is trying to achieve.

Other than, perhaps, to tempt Labour into displays of gross hypocrisy.

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This man only controls the finances of Scotland because Scotland is part of the UK.

Never forget that if you listen to Labour and vote No next September, there’s (at least) a 60% chance that he’ll control the finances of Scotland until 2020. Ready to risk it?