Wings Over Scotland

This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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This, in case you didn’t see it on our Twitter feed, was on the front page of the Independent website this morning (and indeed still is). It wasn’t a mistake.

The piece featured the Scottish author discussing various pieces of news from the past week (the guest is different every Saturday). Topics included Ed Miliband’s suitability to be Prime Minister (or lack thereof), Stephen King’s objections to e-books, corporate tax avoidance and anonymity for people who’ve been arrested.

But while the paper chose to lead with Scottish independence for its headline, for some reason it didn’t carry a picture of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon or Blair Jenkins, nor even of Rankin himself, whose words the headline comprised.

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We were hunting through a load of 1980s issues of 2000AD earlier today, looking for something else altogether, when we stumbled across this. It seemed somehow timely.

We can’t think why.

We don’t normally pick out individual stories from the Sealand Gazette and put them on the front page, but, well, you’ll see why we’ve done it today in a few seconds’ time.

The piece below is from the Ilford Recorder, a newspaper in north-east London.

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Readers will be aware that while we still link to articles in the Scotsman, we rarely encourage anyone to read pieces by Brian Wilson or Michael Kelly. Both generally issue furious, barely-coherent rants consumed by a blind, absolute tribal hatred of anything in any way connected to the SNP and/or independence, and amount to little more than professional trolling.

We’re not going to make an exception for Wilson’s latest, a spittle-flecked diatribe (fuelled by the Scotsman’s favourite useful idiot Jim Sillars) about how the idea that an independent Scotland could have an open border with the rUK is “ridiculous”, and that there would have to be border controls and passport checks. If you really want to read it you can go and find it for yourself.

But we thought it might be interesting to see if we could find a couple of comparable neighbouring countries (eschewing the obvious example of Ireland, which is for some reason apparently invisible to Unionists) and see how they handled it.

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“World’s biggest wave energy farm off Lewis gets go-ahead” (Herald):

“Edinburgh wave energy developer Aquamarine Power says the project along the coast at Lag na Greine, near Fivepenny Borve, described as one of the best wave energy locations in Europe, could power nearly 30,000 homes.”

“Scotland warned independence could cost billions in renewable subsidies” (Guardian):

“Private sector investors have repeatedly warned that they will reconsider their investments in renewables in the UK if the political environment is perceived to be hostile or policies liable to be revised in future. Many Tory MPs have fuelled this uncertainty through outspoken attacks on renewables and the subsidies for them.”

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This story was on the front page of the Scotsman website when we were checking the papers at 7am. It’s now not only vanished from the front page, but from every index we can find. We tried finding it with the site’s Search function using the words in the headline, but none of them bring it up.

We eventually managed to locate it via Google, hidden two-thirds of the way down the Business page, but in case it gets deleted for good, you can find it below.

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The SNP has been assailed from all directions at once recently on the subject of Corporation Tax in an independent Scotland. Radical left-wingers say there’s no point in independence if we’re just going to ape neoliberal policy. The No camp insists both that a “race to the bottom” would be destructive and counter-productive and morally wrong, and that we wouldn’t be allowed to anyway.

(Even the Tories attack the idea, despite having just stolen it wholesale.)

At the same time, the Scottish Government has been bombarded with criticism for giving grants to companies like Amazon, who received more money in the UK from government handouts than they paid in tax. (Despite the company’s tax avoidance being wholly in the remit of the Westminster government rather than the Holyrood one.)

We don’t mind telling you, readers, we’re a bit confused.

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A stunning piece in the Telegraph eventually ran away with the vote in our British Loony Of The Week poll at the weekend. But what we didn’t realise at the time was that we were in fact only conducting the first semi-final. We’ve got two more absolute crackers for you to enjoy today.

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…of welfare reform, we thought you might like to hear this. It’s a short (four and a half minutes) interview with a doctor formerly employed by Atos Healthcare, broadcast on the Today show on Radio 4 last Thursday. Atos were hired to do this work by Labour, and retained by the Tories and Lib Dems. But you knew that already, right?

If you want to listen to the whole segment, it’s from 20 minutes.

With the latest Westminster fearbomb, we mean. We’ve covered the pensions thing in considerable detail already, so the Treasury’s attack was outdated before it was even launched. It’s becoming increasingly plain with every passing day than an independent Scotland would be better off financially than the rest of the UK (unless we get “more powers” after a No vote, that is), so why would it have more difficulty paying pensions?

After all, the UK government didn’t put the effort in to construct an even minimally coherent case, so frankly we don’t see why we should. We’re going for a pie.

The Sunday Mail, 19 May 2013:

“Labour are meant to be convincing Scots that we can trust them with our future. On this evidence, you would not trust them to go to the garage for chocolate.”

The Observer, 19 May 2013:

“The Scots are accustomed to having their views ignored in the British political system. Despite voting consistently for the left, Scotland has been governed by Labour for only 30 years out of 68. If England is set to elect the Conservatives, in other words, it’s hardly worth going out to vote in Scotland at all: we know what we’ll get.”

And today in QFT we’ve got three for the price of one.

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