Wings Over Scotland

Yeah, whatever.

I’m Will McLeod and I’m the Government and World Affairs Correspondent for Netroots Radio in Washington, DC. I’ve been following the Scottish independence referendum for a few years now. Most of the fallacious arguments I’ve seen have been pretty well knocked down, but there’s one in particular that keeps cropping up which is absolutely ridiculous and needs to be dealt with.

I also do policy work for various people, and since no other foreign policy and government policy geeks have knocked down the NATO argument and the defense spending argument, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring.

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Dear God. It’s now almost two and a half years since this site first comprehensively debunked and disproved the notion that Scottish independence would give the Conservatives a permanent majority in the rUK parliament, in an article that’s been read many tens of thousands of times here and spread far and wide elsewhere.

So you’ll forgive us if we spend a few minutes smashing our heads against a brick wall in despair at the mind-bleeding idiocy of some slobbering, sponge-witted poltroon quoted at length in the Telegraph today.

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We suppose we should at least commend the “Vote No Borders” campaign for a certain level of frankness. While their output is little different to the daily hysterical fearmongering of “Better Together”, at least they don’t try to pretend that it’s “positive”.

Sadly, when it comes to the relationship their assertions have with the truth, however, they’re singing very much from the same hymn sheet.

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David Cameron, Prime Minister’s Questions, 30 April 2014:

“I think that what Alex Salmond said [about Vladimir Putin] was a major error of judgment and that all of us in this House should be supporting the Ukrainian desire to be a sovereign, independent country and to have the respect of the international community and party leaders for that ambition.”

(Our emphasis.) It’s not only us finding that just the tiniest bit hypocritical, is it?

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This clip comes from yesterday’s “Good Morning Scotland”, around 2h 35m in.

It features Professor Paul Collier, who is apparently the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and therefore an obvious choice for the BBC as a go-to guy on the subject of Scottish politics.

We think you’ll find it a stimulating and thought-provoking opinion.

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Here’s the Scottish Labour finance spokesman Iain Gray on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, discussing Gordon Brown’s speech in Glasgow on pensions because Mr Brown himself refused to answer any questions about it.

As ever with Mr Gray, he packs a lot of entertainment into a short space of time.

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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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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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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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Does any of this sound familiar, readers?

“Federalists [the opponents of Quebec independence] argued that the Yes campaign’s undertakings, such as those on using the Canadian dollar and joining international organisations, were, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on the agreement of the rest of Canada, on other countries or on international organisations.

The assertion that Canada would immediately assume the obligations and rights of all Canada’s treaties and conventions was particularly controversial. The US, Canada and Mexico all stated that Quebec should not assume that entry into NAFTA would be automatic.”

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To cut a long story short, Wings readers, it turns out that by a freakish coincidence I have a fax number only one digit different to that of Alistair Darling’s constituency office. Attached below is a document I unexpectedly found in my in-tray this evening.

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