Wings Over Scotland

An interesting piece in the Herald today:

Right there, in just two sentences, the spirit of the Union: English people think they should have been allowed to force the Scots to remain in the UK against their will.

If 70% of English people voted against independence (or even in fact, if just 70% of the 56% who think they should have had a vote did), it would have vastly outweighed even 100% of Scots voting Yes. That, readers, is the respect the people of England have for Scottish self-determination and democracy. Every single Scot could have voted for independence, and England’s view is that they should have been able to, and would, force Scotland to stay in the UK.

We’re just going to leave it at that.

We couldn’t help but notice Labour peer, Stalin-moustache enthusiast and celebrity Bobby Ball lookalike Lord/Baron Robert Winston standing at the front of the party’s boorish stag-party gathering of MPs and MSPs in Glasgow yesterday, as Ed Miliband railed against the dastardly SNP and insisted that the NHS wasn’t under threat.

(We didn’t see Andy Burnham among the MPs in the footage, so we assume he was still down in London telling anyone who’ll listen that the NHS is under threat.)

And we couldn’t help wondering whether the peer’s presence was a tacit endorsement by Miliband of his proposal to charge people £120 a year to visit their GP.

Read the rest of this entry →

Earlier today we showed you a clip from a press conference in which Alex Salmond schooled the BBC’s Nick Robinson in some basic financial facts about Corporation Tax, and went on to make a serious allegation about wrongdoing between the BBC and the UK Treasury, in which he claimed that the latter had broken Parliamentary rules by leaking market-sensitive information about RBS.

The BBC dutifully reported the story later in the day.

And as far as we can gather, the First Minister has everyone bang to rights.

Read the rest of this entry →

From a press conference a few minutes ago:

We must admit, this is our favoured mode for the First Minister.

Yesterday the three UK party leaders all came to Scotland to “campaign”. None of them would appear in public or be interviewed on TV, speaking only to small crowds of invited supporters before scurrying south again. Nevertheless, their fleeting presence north of the border meant that the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions was conducted by substitutes. Standing in for David Cameron was William Hague.

So that’s all a bit clearer now.

Read the rest of this entry →

Here’s an image we made back in October 2012:

It’s based on a graphic from the movie version of “V For Vendetta”.

Read the rest of this entry →

George Monbiot in the Guardian, 10 September 2014:

“If Scotland becomes independent, it will be despite the efforts of almost the entire UK establishment. It will be because social media has defeated the corporate media. It will be a victory for citizens over the Westminster machine, for shoes over helicopters.

It will show that a sufficiently inspiring idea can cut through bribes and blackmail, through threats and fear-mongering. That hope, marginalised at first, can spread across a nation, defying all attempts to suppress it. That you can be hated by the Daily Mail and still have a chance of winning.”

We could have picked almost any paragraph. A tour de force.

We’ve long argued that whatever the small print, when it comes to an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union common sense and realpolitik will prevail, because nobody wants Scotland to be out of the EU for even a day and it’s in nobody’s interests for it to be.

Of course, we’re just some idiots with a website and nobody should listen to OUR opinion about anything. But it seems as though people like Graham Avery (Honorary Director-General of the European Commission), Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, (the former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN) and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, (author of a book on EU constitutional law and professor of European law and human rights at Oxford University) ought to have a pretty good inside track on Europe stuff.

And if all those still aren’t enough, how about the esteemed Pat Cox, former President of the European Parliament? He ought to know what he’s talking about, right?

Between this, and this.

First Owen Jones’ stinging rebuff to the odious fauxcialist John McTernan, now this:

As another famous Unionist might say: Oooft!

The alert readers of this site have encountered currency trader Alpesh Patel of equity company Praefinium Partners before. We were more than a little bit scathing about a previous appearance of his on the BBC News channel back in February, on which it seems fair to say that he nailed his Unionist colours very firmly indeed to the mast.

So this clip from the same channel this morning was interesting.

We don’t think his words need any comment from us, save perhaps that we commend Mr Patel for having learned from his previous errors when it comes to assessing the attitude of businesses to the prospect of Scottish independence. Anyone can make a mistake. The key is to not keep repeating it when the evidence proves you wrong.

Save it from what, exactly? Democracy?

(More here.)