It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.
So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.
The weekend’s Scotland on Sunday contained another in a long series of doom-laden predictions about the state of an independent Scotland’s defences, including the assertion that current Scottish soldiers would choose to stay with the British armed forces rather than join Scotland’s because it’d be more exciting.
(Along, as independence supporters would expect, with the standard boilerplate that we’d all be killed by terrorists, and the now-traditional dodgy Scotsman poll.)
The Sunday Times, meanwhile, wasn’t being quite so careful.
We’ve got quite the exclusive for you today, folks. We’re indebted to the alert civil servant who’s managed to smuggle out of Whitehall a copy of the UK government’s draft document of its inaugural greetings to the people of an independent Scotland, to be delivered (naturally) by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.
Given Mr Hague’s recent comments on how “baffling” the very notion of Scottish independence apparently was, readers may find the practical behind-the-scenes reality reassuring. You can read the speech in full below.
Willie Rennie made a bit of an idiot of himself last night. He appeared towards the end of the final instalment of Iain Macwhirter’s largely-excellent STV documentary “Road To Referendum”, with the empirically wrong assertion (in the name of the fabled “positive case for the Union”) that “the National Health Service is a United Kingdom institution, it was created by United Kingdom people.”
This, as alert Wings Over Scotland readers will know in some detail, isn’t true. The NHS has never been a “United Kingdom institution”. From the first day of its creation, it was two independent institutions – the Scottish NHS and the English/Welsh NHS.
(It’s now four separate national bodies – Northern Ireland having its own service, with a different name and different responsibilities, and the Welsh NHS having been “divorced” from the English one and devolved to the Assembly in 1999.)
To the Scottish Lib Dem leader’s embarrassment, the NHS therefore proves the exact opposite of what he’s trying to use it to prove – namely, it shows that Scotland can deliver better health services for its people (free prescriptions, personal care, eye tests, dental check-ups, hospital parking) via independence, yet still co-operate smoothly and productively with the rUK where necessary without the sky falling in.
But Rennie’s clanger triggered off another interesting exchange.
Yesterday we passingly mentioned how Home Secretary Theresa May this week claimed that Scots could lose their British passports and be denied dual nationality following a ‘Yes’ vote for independence in next year’s referendum.
Mystifyingly none of the newspapers reporting the story bothered to research the facts behind her claim, so we had to get our investigating hats on.
From the one-man gaffe goldmine that is Central Ayrshire Labour MP Brian Donohoe:
We do sympathise, and not just with the unfortunate (but alert) constituent of Mr Donohoe’s who sent us this recent press release. It can’t be easy for poor Brian either, constantly having to remind himself “Commemorate… not celebrate. Commemorate… not celebrate” like a low-rent version of Viz’s immortal Eight Ace.
It’s not the first time we’ve had to raise this subject. But as the rhetoric ramps up from an increasingly nasty and unhappy No camp, we have to ask again – just what is the Labour Party’s problem with foreigners?
We stumbled across this quite by accident yesterday. We think you’ll enjoy it.
The clip is from last year, and was aired on Canadian national news channel Sun News. Douglas Murray is a British writer who claims to be half-Scottish on account of unspecified links to Unionist breeding ground the Isle of Lewis, popular haunt of No-camp luminaries like Alistair Darling, virulent Labour anti-devolutionist Brian Wilson and controversial “Better Together” donor Ian Taylor.
Murray studied at Eton and Oxford and writes for august UK journals like the Spectator and Guardian, as well as appearing on numerous BBC political shows. For some reason, the Canadians consider him an expert on Scottish politics, qualified to inform and enlighten their viewers. See what you think.
So here’s a funny thing.
And here it is again, equally categorically:
And again for good measure:
(Our emphases.) That’s pretty clear, then – the No campaign will not accept money from “foreign donors”, but will take “up to £500” from people resident in the UK.
Ian Taylor, chief executive and president of Vitol, is the donor who just keeps on giving:
(Our emphasis, as usual.) To be honest, we hope “Better Together” don’t hand back Mr Taylor’s £500,000 donation. We imagine Yes Scotland will rather enjoy hitting them with this particular oil- and blood-soaked stick all the way to September 2014.
When we’ve reached the point where even the Daily Telegraph is calling the British Prime Minister a liar, it’s probably about time someone laid out the facts about the UK’s nuclear weapons, and in particular how they relate to Scotland.
Let’s see if we can keep it brief.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
