Wings Over Scotland

There’s an article on the BBC website today with the self-explanatory title of “Scottish independence: How would the UK fare without Scotland?”

On the left is what it said yesterday (that losing Scotland would be bad for the UK). On the right is what it says today (that losing Scotland would be good for the UK).

Does anyone know what calamity befell Scotland’s economy overnight?

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For independence supporters of a certain age, the 1979 devolution referendum is one of the most infamous moments in Scottish history. While a wafer-thin majority of Scots voted Yes to devolution, an electoral fiddle conceived by a Labour MP meant that it didn’t happen, and part of the reason was that in effect, dead people were counted as No votes.

(We won’t go into all the details here, but basically an impossible threshold was set for turnout, and people who’d died but hadn’t yet been removed from the electoral roll were counted towards the calculation of that threshold.)

We were put in mind of it by an odd development this evening.

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We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.

We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.

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There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.

For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.

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Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir has a piece today on the nasty comments a tiny handful of idiots made to JK Rowling this week, which – unlike the alleged “barrage” of abuse supposedly unleashed against Labour activist Clare Lally – can at least definitely be said to have happened.

The piece is a tedious one-sided rant, but at the end something awesome happens.

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Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.

(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)

We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.

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We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.

(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)

Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.

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It’s been a grim sort of day today, so let’s finish off with something a bit lighter.

“William Wallace, before Mel Gibson (who is, let’s remind ourselves, a Yankee) made the factually inaccurate film in 1995, was a symbol for the unification of Great Britain, a unionist hero.”

We highly recommend reading the entire thing. It seems not to be a spoof.

We have not made this story up. It’s not the work of BBC Scotlandshire.

Just casually, there, beneath an unassuming, innocuous headline. No big deal.

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Because some of you won’t have seen it yet. This is NOT a spoof.

That’s what they think will persuade people to vote No, readers.

Surely. At least.

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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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