Wings Over Scotland

Today’s Daily Mail carries a dismal article under a hysterical essay of a headline reading “Homes vandalised, accused of stealing jobs and an atmosphere of discriminatory intimidation: The savage racism turning Scotland into a no-go zone for the English”. (It actually describes a couple of minor incidents, spread over several years, affecting a single elderly couple in Stirling, without a shred of evidence that they were in fact motivated by their Englishness.)

There are undoubtedly small pockets of anti-English racism to be found in parts of Scotland, like there are small pockets of every kind of racism and prejudice found in every country in the world. But why would any Scottish person ever be driven to feel animosity towards the English – our friends, our family and our neighbours?

Not just because of a few isolated nutters on Facebook, surely?

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Last week we highlighted the dismissive, contemptuous attitude of many Scottish Labour MPs and MSPs to questions from their constituents, an approach perhaps borne of the safe seats occupied by most of those concerned. However, some politicians from the three Unionist parties in Scotland do still deign to correspond with the electorate, and it would be unfair of us not to acknowledge and credit them for that.

Below, then, are the other responses that Wings readers received to a number of questions relating to independence that we suggested they might like to pose to their elected representatives way back in July. (We’ve given it six weeks, and it seems safe to assume that any who haven’t replied by now aren’t going to.)

It’s a lengthy read, but we think you’ll find it enlightening.

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Here are two snippets from a couple of recent “Better Together” leaflets:

Curiously, that 16% increase has fallen to 13% in their latest “briefing” full of made-up numbers Blair McDougall has pulled out of – well, let’s be polite and say “thin air”. But since they’ve been specifically named, let’s just check the claim with Tesco.

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…you probably write for the Express.

Yesterday we posted a couple of tweets observing the fact that the Scottish media had conspicuously ignored the phenomenon that is The Wee Blue Book. (We’d have made more of the total blanking had we been even a little bit surprised.)

Despite having extensively reported almost every other document published about the referendum debate (such as Sir Tom Hunter’s almost-impenetrable digital-only effort), the press saw nothing at all newsworthy about a 72-page book that’s been downloaded over 400,000 times online and which a small team of complete amateurs had managed to fund, print and distribute more than 250,000 physical copies of in a matter of days, with demand still far outstripping supply.

But it turned out we were being a little unfair.

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Last week I was working in the tattoo studio and got chatting to a client on whom my colleague was completing a large, Japanese-style sleeve on his upper arm and chest. He was sitting upright in his chair, stripped to the waist, his new ink glowing.

We got talking about the referendum. Unusually, this guy was a No voter. I say ‘unusually’ because the vast majority of our clients in the studio are vocally keen Yes types. Perhaps there’s something in the inked person’s character – a bohemian or experimental quality that naturally favours thoughts of change or progression.

This guy was a very nice, friendly, middle-aged small business owner from North Lanarkshire. As a Yes voter, I try not to get too preachy on the subject in the studio simply because it wouldn’t be professional – I wouldn’t want to get into any kind of heated debate with someone I have to tattoo for hours on end.

Still, I lightly prodded him on some of the independence issues. I was curious to hear his perspective as I rarely encounter it in someone face to face.

“Bad for business”, he mumbled in an offhand way. “I just don’t like the sound of it”

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Earlier today we bemoaned some chump throwing an egg at Jim Murphy this week during his Shouting At Old Ladies In Shopping Centres Tour of Scotland, thereby enabling the Scottish press to enjoy an easy orgy of hypocritical “cybernat”-baiting. Murphy has unsurprisingly made the most of the incident, suspending the tour and bizarrely alleging that Yes Scotland is directly co-ordinating the abuse.

Egg-throwing is of course an act of protest rather than violence, and reactions to it tend to depend on whether you support the politics of the “victim” or not. (After all, the entire point of using an egg is that it’s fragile and breaks on impact, making a mess but doing no damage – insult rather than injury.)

This long-standing form of protest was treated as a national joke when someone did it to John Prescott – as was his actually violent reaction – and we don’t seem to remember anyone minding too much when it happened to Nick Griffin.

(For all his vileness, Griffin was a democratically elected politician just as Murphy is.)

Now, we actually have no way of knowing that this week’s culprit was a real Yes supporter rather than a stooge – it seems odd that with Murphy surrounded by so many Labour goons at every event and in a very public place, nobody managed to apprehend or photograph the assailant. But let’s apply Occam’s Razor and assume for the purposes of this piece that they were a genuine disgruntled opponent.

Because the question that then arises is “What else could they do?”

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Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.

He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.

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We’ve been so busy with the Wee Blue Book for the past week or so that we only just got round to listening to last Tuesday’s interview with Alistair Darling on Good Morning Scotland in time, before it vanished from the iPlayer. The former Chancellor gets a quite uncomfortable ride from presenter Gary Robertson, and flaps angrily for much of the ten-and-a-half minutes trying to turn every question into one on currency.

Mr Darling also makes some startlingly and empirically false statements throughout the interview, and we thought it’d be worth noting a few of them and seeing if they crop up on tonight’s BBC1 debate with the First Minister.

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Remember, readers, saying the Scottish NHS is in danger from Westminster attacks on the English one is just a despicable and outrageous Nat scare story.

Alistair Darling and Alistair Carmichael wouldn’t lie to you, after all.

The media coverage of the first TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling was a classic, but transparent, stitch-up. A poll which had a majority Unionist sample before the debate began duly reported a “victory” for Darling, even though among the sample’s small number of undecideds most thought Salmond had won.

But that crooked measurement was enough to justify a week-long frenzy of front pages portraying the debate as a fatal disaster for the First Minister and an epic, decisive triumph for the angry former Chancellor. Inconveniently, two new polls this weekend both showing a swing to Yes and a single-figure No lead somewhat undermine that narrative, but the No campaign is nevertheless desperate to quit while it’s ahead.

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This is Conservative MSP John Scott openly lying to an audience in Ayr yesterday on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Big Debate”, on the subject of whether Scottish people would continue to have access to English hospitals (and specifically Great Ormond Street children’s hospital) in the event of independence.

The female voice correcting him is Jeane Freeman. The truth is below.

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So everyone will believe THAT’s definitely going to happen, then.

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