Wings Over Scotland

I’m going to do something I only do rarely and write this post in the personal pronoun, because it’s very much a personal view rather than an attempt to speak for a wider section of the independence movement. But although it’s been forming for a while, it was finally triggered by an Ian Bell comment piece in the Herald today.

You should read it all, but the key paragraph is this one:

“You have to pause, then, and ask yourself why policies that have failed for three long years cause barely a whisper of argument in Westminster. The only sensible inference, surely, is that what looks like failure to some is a very satisfactory state of affairs to others.”

That simple, understated last sentence cuts to the very heart of why Scots will stand at the edge of a terrible abyss in September 2014, with a herd of buffalo stampeding towards them, and seriously consider NOT grasping at the rope ladder dangling from the last helicopter offering to carry them safely away from the cliff edge.

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The weekend’s Scotland on Sunday contained another in a long series of doom-laden predictions about the state of an independent Scotland’s defences, including the assertion that current Scottish soldiers would choose to stay with the British armed forces rather than join Scotland’s because it’d be more exciting.

(Along, as independence supporters would expect, with the standard boilerplate that we’d all be killed by terrorists, and the now-traditional dodgy Scotsman poll.)

The Sunday Times, meanwhile, wasn’t being quite so careful.

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We should, if for nothing else, commend the No campaign for gradually learning from experience. Much hilarity ensued when it attempted to claim an independent Scotland would need to renegotiate “14,000 treaties”, and even more fun was had when it produced a list of 500 (actually 507) “questions” about independence.

So we applaud the UK government for dialling down the crazy a notch and producing another doom-and-gloom list of reasons why it would be impossible for Scotland to achieve what around 150 countries have managed to achieve in the last century or so, but which restricts itself to just a modest 200 entries.

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We’ve noted a few times on this site that if you can judge a person by the company they keep, then the “Better Together” campaign would be an unsavoury character indeed. Backed enthusiastically by the likes of UKIP, the EDL/SDL, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order, it must be an uncomfortable place for Lib Dems and self-professed “internationalist socialists” within Labour to be living.

By contrast, the blackest sheep in the Yes family are a tiny handful of anonymous internet McGlashan sorts, daft and sometimes shouty but plainly harmless. We can’t recall any examples of Yes supporters being caught out giving Nazi salutes or calling for the forced repatriation of immigrants or the murder of Catholics, and you can be sure if there were any they’d have been all over every newspaper in the land.

So there’s a degree of irony in the newest recruit to the Unionist cause.

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The concluding episode of STV’s “Road To Referendum” was almost a one-stop repository of some of the most compelling arguments for independence. Not because of anything in the show’s own script, nor even any of the interviews with the Yes camp, but rather the contributions of the Unionist side.

Whether it was Willie Rennie’s cluelessness, Jack McConnell’s revolting attempt to misrepresent the views of a dying international statesman, Michael Kelly’s reference to the Scots as “they” or Jim Murphy’s misplaced arrogant complacency, the programme showcased some of the least attractive aspects of the anti-independence movement.

The ugliest bug at the ball, though, was the UK’s Prime Minister.

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First you let them hatch, then you count them, and then they come home to roost.

Continuing our series of favourite extracts from last night’s “Road To Referendum”, here’s Labour’s delightful Trident advocate Jim Murphy, speaking in May 2010.

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We almost feel sorry for the UKIP candidate for Aberdeen Donside, poor Otto Inglis. All day today he’s been pictured on news bulletins standing silently like a spare object at a wedding while broadcasters interviewed his party’s leader Nigel Farage instead.

Then again, after the brutal shoeing Mr Farage took from STV’s Bernard Ponsonby this evening, perhaps Mr Inglis will be feeling he got the best end of the deal.

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That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:

The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.

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The producers of Game Of Thrones, a complex fantasy drama filled with sex and violence (and quite coincidentally also one of the most popular shows currently on TV), considered shooting the hit series in Scotland but were unable to do so because of a lack of quality studio space, the Scotsman reveals today.

The show ended up being shot in Northern Ireland (at the Titanic Studios in Belfast) instead, bringing benefits of an estimated £60m to the region’s economy with around £160m more expected over several years of production.

According to the report a high-profile film source said:

“When contemplating where to shoot Game of Thrones, HBO first thought of Scotland. The settings were a natural fit: hills and glens and rugged castles. However, the lack of a studio meant the production logistics, control and cost made no sense to production planners.”

But there’s an interesting undercurrent to this tale of woe.

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So, everyone turned up for Question Time in the end. We expected no different. As far as we can ascertain, the view in the pro-independence community was that the SNP’s Angus Robertson acquitted himself well as the sole political representative of the Yes campaign, and it was interesting and welcome to see journalist Lesley Riddoch (who was also assured and compelling) actually nail her colours to the Yes mast too.

But what of the show itself? Were the fears of independence supporters justified, or did the BBC mount an impeccable exercise in impartiality? Let’s find out.

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We’re struggling to think of a reason why the SNP’s Angus Robertson (and to a slightly lesser extent journalist Lesley Riddoch) would still want to turn up for tonight’s Question Time in Edinburgh. Up against four anti-independence panellists, Robertson can’t expect to achieve much other than looking embattled and defensive – he can surely hope for little protection from David Dimbleby in the chair.

Riddoch has already tweeted about the show’s imbalanced line-up. If our memory serves us correctly, she’s a firm advocate of the policy of male speakers refusing to appear on heavily gender-imbalanced panels (which tonight’s QT also is), so why not politically-skewed ones too?

It seems to this site that principled withdrawal is by far the better option.

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We were going to do something on the disgraceful line-up of tonight’s edition of Question Time, broadcasting from Edinburgh with an audience of 16/17-year-olds, but frankly we couldn’t put it any better than the Scottish Green Party’s official complaint to the Corporation has. You can read it in full here.

UKIP have no Westminster MPs, no Holyrood MSPs and no Welsh AMs, and attract a microscopic proportion of the vote in Scottish elections, yet their leader Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time (14) than any other politician since 2009. The Greens have representation in both Westminster and Holyrood, but the Scottish party has been invited onto QT just once in the same period.

The show’s guest list tonight will uphold the BBC’s standard debate policy of four anti-independence politicians (Farage plus George Galloway, Anas Sarwar and Ruth Davidson) against a single pro-independence one (the SNP’s Angus Robertson) with a token neutral (Scotsman journalist Lesley Riddoch). Enjoy. We’ll be playing poker.