Wings Over Scotland

Readers might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu on watching last night's Newsnight Scotland, which featured a rather animated interview with Alistair Darling. Because not for the first time, the No campaign chief seemed to be experiencing a considerable amount of difficulty in getting his story straight.

Let's examine a couple of intriguing snippets.

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Wait, sorry. We got confused. As far as we can establish from some recent official statements by the UK Government, the No campaign and the media, Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going if Scotland votes for independence. Let’s have a quick recap on where we’re up to.

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You can click to make the picture bigger, if you can’t already see the big picture.

Oh dear, BBC.

That’s a very poor effort at impartiality indeed.

The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

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John Harris in the Guardian today:

“[six years ago] to be living on an estate, and in receipt of benefits, and possibly out of work, was to not just to be fair game for Oxford undergraduates, the future king and a certain kind of TV comedian, but the butt of a huge national joke. Some of us wondered where exactly what was briefly known as ‘The New Snobbery’ was headed.

We now know. Its cultural aspects were merely the tip of the iceberg – as the Labour party engaged in the rebranding of social security as ‘welfare’ and its ministers raged against ‘benefit cheats’, something poisonous was being embedded at the core of our national life.

While the Conservative party grimaced through a fleeting modernisation, it sat there, ready to be picked up by a Tory-led administration and taken to its logical conclusion.”

And, of course, by Scottish Labour.

You might enjoy this line from approximately the Guardian’s 400th hopeful “Come on, Labour, you can do it!” article of the last couple of years. We’ve actually read some pretty interesting analysis on the possible outcomes of the 2015 UK general election recently, but this bit of content-free space-filler from Jackie Ashley wasn’t among it. The second sentence was something to cherish, though:

“2012 was the Olympics; 2014 will be European elections and the run-up to the general election.”

Nothing else of any interest happening in the United Kingdom in 2014, then, Jackie? Such as, y’know, it perhaps ceasing to exist? Still, those European elections eh?

We must admit, we’re having some trouble getting our heads round the lead story in today’s Herald. Under the headline “Row flares as Treasury blasts SNP oil dividend”, the paper quotes Danny Alexander outlining what the Chief Secretary to the Treasury appears to believe is a devastating case against independence – namely, that if you were to calculate oil revenues over the period since devolution, Scots would each be a grand total of £1 a year worse off independent than if Scotland remained in the UK.

We suspect that while Alexander’s figures may not be inaccurate as such – within their own carefully-selected frame of reference – this is nevertheless an example of the Many Small Lies principle (aka the Swarm Of Wasps), in that there are so many absurdly gaping holes in his argument that it’s difficult to know which one to focus on. So let’s see if we can quickly pick out just a handful and give them a brief once-over.

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In a slightly surprising development reported late this afternoon by the Guardian, the Ministry of Defence appeared to suddenly and officially confirm what most supporters of independence have asserted for some time: that if Scotland becomes independent the rUK will lose its nuclear deterrent, as it has nowhere else to put it.

In a surprisingly direct response to a question from CND, the Ministry revealed that “the safety arrangements for Devonport [naval base near Plymouth, widely regarded as the only possible alternative berth for the submarines] do not permit the presence of submarines carrying Trident nuclear warheads”, and that “The MoD’s safety experts are not considering changing that“.

It was already known that even if the submarines themselves could be docked in Devonport, there was no possibility of replicating the Coulport weapons base without years of work costing billions of pounds, but the MoD’s unexpected revelation, as well as being an apparent reversal of the Ministry’s position of a year ago, is a dramatic intervention with radical and complex implications for the independence debate.

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There’s an absolutely despicable article on Labour Uncut today that we’re reluctant to link to. There’s a Google Cache version here, and in case it dies we’ve reprinted the whole thing below (sue us, Labour Uncut) so you don’t need to give the site traffic.

For the most part it’s a tedious rehash of the tired old “votes for 80 million expat and diaspora Scots” routine, but it’s enlivened with some ugly, base abuse of the First Minister, or “the fat, failed economist from Hollyrood” [sic] as author and Labour member Ian Stewart refers to him. The worst part, though, comes just before the end.

“At a time when the French voters of London have their own seat in the National Assembly, when serious moves are being made to press for a similar accommodation in the Irish Republic, not to mention Sinn Feinn’s mooting of some kind of a say for the wider diaspora, what do we get? Oh yes, the chance to maybe need a passport to visit granny.

Perhaps Mr Salmond made his attitude clear to these millions when he organised the great “Homecoming 2009” a while back – when it was clear to all that if your accent was in English rather than American, you had best not bother.”

This, we feel wholly confident in asserting, is a defamatory and libellous statement. The notion that Alex Salmond ever suggested, let alone made it “clear to all”, that English people weren’t welcome at Homecoming 2009 is one utterly unsupported in fact, and a normally-respectable site like Labour Uncut should be ashamed to have printed an open and direct accusation that the First Minister is a racist.

The battle over independence will get ugly in the next 18 months. We hope the Yes side doesn’t descend to the depths of Mr Stewart, and that the aggressive provocation of the Unionists doesn’t lead to the spilling of blood in Scotland as it continues to do in Northern Ireland. If it does, forgiveness will be a long time coming.

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Journalists and broadcasters tend to be very prickly about allegations that they do their job in a biased way, and it’s a difficult claim to prove. Much of the time it centres around the belief that “If this story was about Party Y rather than Party X you’d be covering it in a different way”, and that’s a hard assertion to back up because it’s based on an assumption rather than an empirical, demonstrable reality – it’s rare that two parties or two politicians ever find themselves in completely comparable situations.

So we’re very grateful to the good people of the Herald this week for kindly providing us with an eye-opening illustration of what happens when they do.

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The only downside to the success of Wings Over Scotland’s first year was that the site took up so much time it had a damaging effect on our finances. (So extra-special thanks to those who contributed a few quid via the Donate page to help keep us in webhosting and 35p pasta.) Luckily, it looks as though we’ll be able to give up and get back to some proper paid writing work shortly, as there’s someone who’s decided to do our job for us far more effectively than we could ever hope to. (Link added.)

“No campaigners must publicise the fact that this is as good as it gets […] With a No win little is going to change. Right here, right now you can see the kind of country we are going to be living in. No use kidding on that there is going to be some great dramatic change.”

Thanks for that, Michael Kelly of the Scotsman. We couldn’t have put it better.