Wings Over Scotland

Our email inbox this week has been packed with people sending in their Labour MP’s or MSP’s responses to our questions about the party’s proposals for the devolution of taxation (aka “Devo Nano”) in the event of a No vote.

With the exception of the very first reply – an arrogant, rude, dismissive effort from Tom Harris – until this evening all of them have been the exact same text except for minor variations in the introductory sentences, with some members choosing to insert little digs at this site but others being more polite to their constituents.

But tonight everything changed.

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We’ve had a second response from a Labour elected representative to a reader, regarding our six simple factual questions about the party’s “Devo Nano” proposals for the Scottish Parliament. This one’s from Richard Baker, regional MSP for North East Scotland and Labour’s former Shadow Finance Secretary.

We were extremely surprised by its contents. You can read the reply, stripped only of two paragraphs of introductory waffle about Keir Hardie, below.

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Sorry we’ve been a bit post-light today, readers. The phone’s barely stopped ringing, and when it did it was only for long enough to scratch the surface of an avalanche of tweets and emails, all concerning this week’s zany goings-on with the Glasgow Subway. Suffice it to say that you haven’t heard half of what’s transpired yet, but we hope to bring you the full story pretty soon.

For now, for anyone who missed them, STV, BBC and the Guardian.

Heavens above, readers. Immersing ourselves as we do in the tepid and murky waters of Scottish political journalism for a living – because it was either that or drowning kittens in a bucket and the hours for that are slightly unsociable – we sometimes imagine that we’ve become inured to even the most fatuously cretinous word-vomiting arse-quackery that passes for analysis in the supposedly intelligent press.

And then we read something like the spectacularly, cosmically moronic mind-sewage Hamish Macdonell just strained and heaved onto the electro-pages of the Spectator this afternoon and realise that the abyss of idiocy has no end, or at the very least culminates in a black-hole singularity from which the light of reason can never escape.

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From the Norwich Evening News, 4 March 2014:

“‘It is ridiculous that independence for Scotland is even being given consideration at all.

Much blood was spilled over centuries to bring the home nations together.

It’s disrespectful to the honour of those that suffered to think that a cross on a ballot paper can undo that. National pride and patriotism is what being a Scot is all about, and there is not a nation in the world that has more of it than Scotland. We don’t need economic independence to prove it.’

Blair Ainslie is managing director of Great Yarmouth-based offshore firm Seajacks. He hails from Dunbar, East Lothian and moved south of the border in 1979.”

That one’s making our head spin.

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Heavens above. We thought that being reduced to sending out chain letters might have been some sort of rogue effort, but it seems “Better Together” really is as desperate for cash  as it’s appeared to be in recent months, with barely a week going by that we don’t get an email from Alistair Darling, chatting about some aspect of the debate before suddenly going “SO WE NEED MONEY! MONEY! SEND MONEY NOW!”

But the piece above appearing in this week’s Sunday Times (where we initially missed it because it was in the “UK News” rather than the “Scottish News” section) was backed up by another piece of extraordinary panhandlery.

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Our old pal Euan McColm of Scotland on Sunday and ThinkScotland (also a stalwart of BBC/STV punditry, and formerly of the disgraced News Of The World) thinks you’re all just a figment of our imagination, readers.

If you’re not following, the implication (also made by James Mackenzie of “Better Nation”) is that we’re taking the money out of the fundraiser as soon as it comes in, then paying it back in ourselves as a new donation to artificially inflate the total.

(Although we’re not quite sure WHY we’d be doing that, as it would only result in us losing a sizeable chunk of the money we already had in commission every time we “recycled” it, and it would dissuade people from donating because they saw we’d already hit our target, and finally it’d mean that we then had to fund all the things we promised to do without actually having the money to pay for them.)

We’ve offered to show Mr McColm the books, on the condition that he writes an article for Scotland on Sunday or the Scotsman, openly and directly accusing us of what he implies in the tweets above. Let’s see how that goes.

We’ll have some comment on that for you when we’ve prised our jaw off the floor.

If we should be fortunate enough to exceed the target in our imminent fundraiser, readers, we promise we’ll use any extra money to try to make this happen.

In truth, the “Better Together” campaign jumped the shark a long time ago. Whether it was #500questions, or the mobile-phone roaming charges story (the moment when even a supportive media started saying “Oh, come on”), or any of literally dozens of others, the fact of the matter is that it’s been engaged for at least a year now in some sort of 110m Shark Hurdling event.

Or perhaps some sort of Shark Pentathlon, starting with a Shark Long Jump, followed by the Shark Hurdles, Shark High Jump, Shark Triple Jump and culminating in a Shark Pole Vault. Frankly, on current form the only way the No campaign could get any more clearance over the shark is with a nuclear-powered pogo stick.

But still, you have to admire the way they keep trying for a new record.

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Can’t wait to read these two stories in the morning.

Goodnight, readers.

We’re not sure which of The Scotsman and Murdo Fraser of the Scottish Conservatives was most confused this morning. Reporting on the second half of its intriguing ICM poll (which put the gap between Yes and No votes as low as six points), the paper publishes some data about the attitude of Scots to the EU.

Excluding don’t knows, the results provide a clear 16-point margin for Scotland remaining in Europe, at 58% to 42%. (The raw numbers put it only slightly lower, at 46 to 33.) But for some odd reason the newspaper chooses to reveal this vote of confidence under the bafflingly negative headline “A third of Scots would back exit from EU”, without even an “only” in there to reflect the implication of the stats.

Weirder still is Murdo Fraser’s reaction, though.

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