Wings Over Scotland

When you’ve been wading in the Scottish and UK media for two and a half years, it’s easy to develop a siege mentality and believe that the entire rest of the world buys into its cataclysmic view of independence. So it’s a relief when you realise that beyond the borders of Britain, most people are calm, rational and practical about the prospect.

We’re going to take things a little bit easy over the holiday weekend, so why not relax and both read the article we’ve linked in paragraph 1 and watch the above discussion between some learned international gentlemen (including Scotland’s own Professor James Mitchell) at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC for a slightly less apocalyptic view of a world with an independent Scotland in it?

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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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We’re off to watch the Scottish Cup semi-final now, so to keep you all entertained for the next couple of hours here’s a little something we put together at the request of columnist and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, and for anyone who was listening to Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” this morning.

Hopefully we won’t need it ourselves by 3.30pm. #COYR

We’ve had these sitting around for a few days without getting round to posting them, but as we’re currently knee-deep in the last tranche of data from our Panelbase poll, it seemed as good a time as any to clear the decks.

First up in the ambiguously-named Posterotron is the “respectable” face of British nationalism, in the form of UKIP European-election candidate David Coburn.

Easy, ladies.

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If it’s Wednesday, Labour must have changed their position on their future-devolution proposals again. Following our latest highlighting of the glaring contradictions in the shambolic “Devo Nano” plans, responses have started arriving to your letters.

If you’ve been listening closely, you’ll have heard that the position on whether the Scottish Parliament would be able to reduce taxes below the UK level has see-sawed from “No you can’t” (Johann Lamont MSP, 18 March) to “Yes you can” (Richard Baker MSP, 28 March) and back to “No you can’t” again (Tom Clarke MP, 4 April).

Well, guess what?

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The other (and more complete) view of this story from yesterday:

Remember, readers, when we were all over the papers as “creepy as f**k”, intimidatory “spies” for peacefully and non-confrontationally documenting alleged “Better Together” events with long-distance photos in which we carefully avoided publishing anything that could be used to identify any individuals?

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This is “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling’s interview on this morning’s Andrew Marr Show. Despite the sort of respectful-verging-on-subservient treatment the former Chancellor received from Marr, who uncharacteristically couldn’t bring himself to interrupt during the 10-minute piece, Mr Darling blinked even more furiously than usual throughout a bewildering flurry of contradictions, non-sequiturs and outright falsehoods.

Even Marr was driven to remark on the wealthy Labour MP’s agitated state by the end of the piece, and while it’s very hard to keep up, we recorded a total of 777 blinks in 10 minutes with our manual clicker. Have a go yourself – we suspect it would actually be possible to get results 100 either side of that figure.

Of course, maybe Mr Darling is just overdue a trip to SpecSavers.

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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.)

We appreciate that you’re busy people, readers, so through the miracles of modern technology we’ve actually managed to compress the entire five-minute interview between Andrew Neil and Alistair Carmichael, the Secretary of State for Portsmouth, on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland down to just 19 seconds without in any way compromising the accuracy or completeness of its content.

If you watch the whole thing we think you’ll agree we’ve captured the essence.

We’ll be honest with you, readers, we just couldn’t face transcribing Johann Lamont’s latest traffic-accident of an interview, this time 12 unforgettable minutes on Sunday Politics Scotland. But we did have a sudden flash of inspiration.

Above you can watch the interview for yourself. But although Johann’s mangled syntax and non-sequitur approach to answering questions is just too much pain for our poor tortured brain to endure twice in one week, we realised that what’s a lot quicker and easier to do is write down the gist of proceedings.

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We’ve been taking the mickey out of Labour a lot in the last couple of days, which has been thoroughly merited and done with serious intent, but we thought it’d be nice to finish the week with something a bit more positive. Those of you who follow our Twitter account may have seen it already, but if not it’s well worth taking some time out for.

It’s a speech made at a Yes Scotland meeting in Lockerbie by Mark Frankland, who alert readers will recall from his appearance on this site last year, and it pretty much speaks for itself. Get this man on more stages.

The last 40 years of UK politics accurately summarised in 30 seconds.

(From episode 3 of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, still on iPlayer at time of writing.)