Wings Over Scotland

A terrible article in today’s Observer nevertheless helpfully provides the most utterly categorical refutation yet of the endlessly-repeated Unionist lie that Spain would veto an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

The piece ran under the blatantly untrue headline “Spain drops plan to impose veto if Scotland tries to join EU” – it has NEVER had such a plan – and went on to propagate a whole series of further falsehoods asserted without any basis by reporter Jennifer Rankin, but such a spectaculary direct and unambiguous quote bangs yet another nail into a coffin that only the very stupidest of the nation’s pundits are still trying to insist contains a living occupant.

So let’s collect everything in one handy place.

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Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 March 2017)
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We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.

Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.

It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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The figure below is my own, but it’s also remarkably typical:

Click the pic to get yours.

(It actually feels like a lot more than that – quite possibly because I have, in fact, not for one minute of my entire life been represented by a government at Westminster – or anywhere else, come to that – that I voted for, unless you count the token presence of the Lib Dems in the 2010-15 coalition. Which I don’t, because they immediately betrayed every policy and principle for which I’d voted for them in the first place.)

For Scotland, democracy in the UK simply doesn’t work.

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One of the favourite sneering Unionist memes of the independence referendum was the mocking dismissal of claims by some Yes supporters that there might be “secret oil fields” in a location off the west of Shetland known as Clair Ridge.

So amused were the Unionists by this notion that they were still sniggering about it regularly years after the referendum, right up to earlier this month.

Curiously, they’ve gone a little quieter in recent days.

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As the Prime Minister prepares to meet the First Minister and doggedly give her “now is not the time” mantra another few dozen run-throughs for the cameras, we thought that you might enjoy a little trip down Memory Lane.

Ah, the old days.

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No.10: Jackie Kemp, journalist.

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Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:

Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.

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There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.

It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.

Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.

And it’s not hard to see why.

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