Wings Over Scotland

It’s one of the more striking aspects of the No campaign that no matter how many panicky editorials appear in right-wing papers bemoaning the fact that their neverending litany of negativity and scaremongering is proving counter-productive (we don’t even bother linking to them any more, there are so many), and no matter how many kickings “Better Together” takes from its own side (the firmly anti-independence Independent columnist Katie Grant was especially scathing on “Headlines” last weekend), the negativity just keeps pouring out.

So of necessity, we try to keep things brief in order to keep up. With that in mind, let’s see how quickly we can deal with today’s media orgy on the subject of defence.

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One of the great things about this site’s sky-high viewing figures is that on the rare occasions when we might be, for example, out having a walk in the park to get over the crushing disappointment of somehow losing yet another Scottish Cup semi-final, our ever-vigilant readers will remain alert.

Otherwise, we might have missed this.

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As alert Wings reader may recall, I work for a charity in the Borders. Our volunteer who does the Monday-morning food run up the Nith valley is away in Asia and Australia for a month, so my week now starts with a ride up the A76. The countryside is drop-dead gorgeous, particularly in the early morning when the newly risen sun paints the peaks of the hills all kind of glowing colours.

But the beaten up towns of the valley are like refugees. Only a few decades ago towns like Sanquhar and Kirkconnel had a genuine reason to exist. They mined coal. They helped keep everyone’s lights on. Then everything changed as Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill played out their poker game which eventually consigned places like Sanquhar and Kirkconnel to the scrap heap of history.

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A Yes vote in the independence referendum would elevate Scotland to the top of the world political agenda for one reason and one reason only: the fact that the UK’s entire nuclear arsenal would unavoidably be located in a foreign country for years. Everything else about the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK – currency sharing, borders, taxation – is subordinate to that simple and critical fact.

The UK’s serious-minded and capable Defence Secretary Philip Hammond told Andrew Marr on Sunday that he “didn’t think” it was he who had told the Guardian, a couple of days beforehand, that Scotland would be able to currency-share with the UK.

You can take that any way you like, but he also pointed out that he’d just spent the week in Washington DC.

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David Mitchell in the Guardian, 30 March 2014:

“There’s always a chance that people will decide who to vote for according to policy – and by ‘people’, I mean the people that matter: the indecisive minority who change which party they vote for from election to election according to whim, and consequently determine every result.

But it doesn’t seem likely to me that policy is what’s going to swing the swingers this time – although I may only think that because the Labour Party’s policies are still largely secret.”

People only vote for change if they think there’ll actually be some.

Building into a thrilling partwork!

(When we’ve done all 12 of these we’ll be compiling them into a single massive post for easy reference, but it might have been a bit much to handle in one sudden burst.)

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From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

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A pretty unequivocal view from Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times, a man who knows a thing or two about how George Osborne’s mind works:

(From yesterday’s Sunday Politics.)

It’s Alex Salmond who’s supposed to be the betting man. With regard to his lifelong pursuit of independence he often recites an old verse penned by the Earl Of Montrose:

“He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small,
Who dare not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.”

But as the bookies’ odds continue to tighten on the referendum, the surprise revelation of this week has been that it’s dour, staid, grey old Alistair Darling who’s gambled everything on a needless, reckless punt.

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We haven’t written anything about the Guardian’s explosive story on currency union this weekend, largely because we have nothing much to add to it.

The original piece seems to cover everything pretty well, and just about all we can think of to comment on is the way the BBC and many other newspapers have seemingly deliberately misinterpreted a line of the unnamed minister’s quote, to portray it as a suggestion that there would be a direct trade of a currency union for Scotland continuing to host Trident after independence.

But it’s not the only one of the pillars of the No camp that’s crumbling today.

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A new poll by Populus for the Daily Politics is out today, with some interesting rankings for the four UK party leaders. (Which in a UK context includes Nigel Farage, despite his representing a party without a single MP while there are seven other parties at Westminster who do have seats.)

As you can see, UK respondents were asked to identify the three main qualities they associated with each leader, from a list of positive and negative ones. It’s fair to say none comes out covered in glory – fewer than one in five people think the UK’s Prime Minister is “competent”, for example. But the balance is striking.

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