Wings Over Scotland

WARNING: this post isn’t about football, but it will refer to football for quite a while in order to illustrate its point. Get over it or go outside for some fresh air.

Today is the opening day of the SPFL Premiership season, and will see the top-flight debut of a four-year-old club which is legally entitled under company law to use the name and trademarks of a much older one which went into liquidation in 2012 owing creditors tens of millions of pounds.

The facts of that matter are beyond any empirical dispute, but human beings are adept at arguing things which are demonstrably not true and so the truth is hotly and furiously rejected by a substantial group of people, weirdly including the club itself (even as it insists that it can’t be held responsible for the old club’s debts because it’s not the same club).

We’re not going to attempt to settle that argument here, because (a) it’s already been settled, and (b) we have nothing new to say that would remotely convince the people who’ve already steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the proven facts.

Instead, we’re going to talk – not for the first time, sadly – about why the “debate” around “Rangers” won’t die, and what it tells us about the Scottish media.

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Have you ever wondered how you try to poison and shut down a debate and a political environment that you fear you’ve found yourself on the losing side of, readers? Well, it’s funny you should ask, because as it happens we’ve got a visiting professor – an expert authority on the subject – with us today to give us a demonstration.

Make sure you’ve got your pens and notepads ready. He’s got a very busy schedule and we can’t afford to have him here for long.

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A parable of internet abuse. Acknowledgements to Alan Moore and Frankie Boyle.

Dedicated to David Torrance, Susan Calman, Johanna Baxter and Angela Eagle.

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There’s been a statistic released in Scotland, so obviously there’s a crisis.

Anarchy on the streets can only be moments away.

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The mad explosion of news that consumed most of July has largely abated. The Tories have a new leader, Labour are settling in for an insanely destructive and bitter two-month factional war in order to (almost certainly) re-elect the same one they only elected 10 months ago, and Brexit is on hold until next year.

So with a palpable sigh of relief, the Scottish political media has been able to get back to what it does best: juvenile silly-season drivel about nothing.

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In December 2013, the editor of this site – who knew nothing of the secret this article is about to reveal – tweeted “When we write the chronicles of independence, I hope there’ll be a whole chapter on @A_DarlingMP”.

Well, this is as close as we’re going to get.

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Yes supporters are currently holding what seems to be a very well-attended march from Glasgow’s Botanical Gardens to a rally in George Square, with thousands more people seemingly turning up than even the organisers’ highest pre-event estimates.

We could verify that with footage from the Labour-controlled City Council’s webcam at the square, if it hadn’t mysteriously stopped working an hour and ten minutes ago, weirdly enough at the exact moment the march started to arrive.

Funny, that. We’re sure it’s just a coincidence.

This week I published, through Common Weal, a discussion paper on the potential currency options for an independent Scotland in light of the material changes in circumstances caused by the Brexit vote.

This paper examines some of the options open to an independent Scotland and concludes that, on balance, the best option for Scotland would be a Scottish currency, initially pegged to Sterling but with the infrastructure and mechanisms in place to move, replace or remove that peg if and when it proves advantageous.

(As the UK did itself in the 1980’s when the pound was pegged first to the US dollar and then to the Deutschmark.)

One of the requirements of an independent currency is that Scotland would need its own foreign reserve fund which would act as a buffer against trade imbalances and would be used to counter movements in exchange rate (particularly if we were pegged our exchange rate to Sterling).

It was on this particular point that yesterday’s Scottish edition of the Daily Express chose to focus, in its characteristically measured, balanced and thoughtful manner.

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Well done to everyone concerned. Paedophiles and the Daily Mail will be partying hard tonight. Although as it later transpired, only for a while. The Supreme Court ruled that while the Named Persons legislation needed a small tweak on data-protection grounds which will most likely delay it for a few months, condemning more children to needless suffering, its core aims in fact WERE lawful.

(It remains to be seen how much the restrictions on information-sharing will hamper the successful operation of the scheme.)

This won’t stop the campaign against it, however, so there’s still hope for those who want to batter toddlers to death without interference from the pesky nanny state.

We’d say more, but just read this again.

A new YouGov poll of Scottish voters was released today. It had no voting-intention figures, and concerned itself mostly with people’s assessment of the main Scottish and UK party leaders. The Labour-voters column was interesting to say the least.

That’s rather a lot of love for a Tory PM from people who voted Labour at the last UK election just over a year ago – more of Scottish Labour’s remaining voters found Theresa May likeable than dislikeable. But then things got even weirder.

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