Wings Over Scotland

This is hereditary Westminster Labour MP Anas Sarwar in yesterday’s Evening Times:

“Now, it’s been said by some that there is no passion in the case that we are better together as part of the United Kingdom.

Well, the people saying that obviously haven’t been at any of the rallies I have been at across Scotland, and where I spoke about an idea much bigger than independence; the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK for the benefit of everyone in the UK.”

Hang on – “rallies”? Were we watching the wrong channel when we missed the tens of thousands of people packing the streets for the Great Rally Of The Union? Were we passed out in a cupboard for the whole time when the Anas Sarwar Evangelical Roadshow filled football stadia in every corner of the land with crazed disciples waving Union Jacks and chanting “POOL AND SHARE! POOL AND SHARE!”?

Rallies? What on Earth is the truth-averse wee twerp talking about? We need a doctor.

It’s our own fault for reading a Brian Monteith column in the Scotsman, but:

“Am I the only person that finds it rather rich that Alex Salmond is so keen on debating the views of David Cameron, an Englishman with an English constituency, when he consciously arranged for the views of tens of thousands of people on the Scottish electoral register to be excluded from taking part in the referendum? Why did he not wish to hear their views?”

Hang on – Alex Salmond did what now? As far as we know, if you’re on the Scottish electoral register you get a vote in the referendum. What happened? Which “tens of thousands of people” are we talking about here? Shouldn’t this have been in the news or something? We hate trying to catch up after the holidays.

We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.

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If we’re being honest, Irish Times, it’s not the phrase we’d have chosen:

And this one might just take the entire cake stand and banana hanger.

It’s former Tory MP and junior minister Edwina Currie, speaking about someone called “Alex Salmon” on Radio 5’s Stephen Nolan show on Saturday. (From 2h 16m on that iPlayer link.) We do recommend listening to all six-and-a-half minutes. It sets a very high standard from the off, but somehow maintains it the whole way through. Enjoy.

We’ve noted a few times recently that the increasingly bitter, angry and even violent tone of the “Better Together” campaign isn’t the sort of thing you’d normally expect from a movement confident and relaxed about its chances of victory.

But over the space of just the last few days – perhaps enraged by the positivity of the SNP conference – the defenders of the Union have been descending into madness even more precipitously than usual.

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We forget who, but someone we read this week – in the Herald, we think – referenced a line spoken by Jennifer Aniston’s character in an old episode of Friends (which we’ve managed to identify as S02E01, “The One With Ross’s New Girlfriend”):

“When I saw him get off that plane with her, I really thought I just hit rock bottom. But today, it’s like there’s rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me.”

We were put in mind of it by something in this afternoon’s Guardian.

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So, to the elephant in the room, then. Certain elements of the Scottish press are busting a gut today in an attempt to fabricate a scandal around a man writing some honest opinions in a newspaper for money.

Judging by the tone of the coverage, it seems they have a case, in so far as that Scottish newspapers are plainly no place for honesty.

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For some reason which escapes our understanding, the operator of the misleadingly-named “Scottish Labour” Twitter account chose to tweet this message this afternoon.

We know the answer, but we’re jiggered if we get the point.

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An alert reader today pointed us towards internet traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and in particular its statistics for the Yes and No campaigns’ official websites. There was an interesting quirk (or at least one that might pass for interesting in the silly season).

Can you spot it?

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If we’d seen this 15 minutes earlier, we’d have made it the And Finally… story instead of the GTA V picture. To be honest, we’re still kinda rubbing our eyes and not quite believing it. Did we just get invaded before we were even a country?

There’s a rather odd opinion column by Des Clarke in the Daily Record today. Entitled “Let’s be proud Scots and get our own proper version of America’s Independence Day”, readers might reasonably assume it had something to do with, well, independence.

Instead, the 500-word piece talks about pretty much anything else. Des, a DJ for London-based radio network Capital FM, throws out an almost-complete bingo card of Scottish stereotypes – kilts, Jimmy hats, deep-frying, Buckfast, it’s all there – while bemoaning the lack of a Scottish national holiday like the one the Americans have every July 4th to celebrate winning their independence from the UK.

But impressively, he manages to make not a single reference, even obliquely, to the fact the Scotland is going to be actually voting on independence next year, which one might imagine would provide the perfect excuse for just such an annual shindig.

We’re not saying it’s sinister. It’s just a bit weird.