Wings Over Scotland

As far back as I can recall, I haven’t believed in anything.

I’ve had no over-riding passion for change, I’ve felt jaded and disconnected from the establishment, from the institutions. Westminster and the political scene of the UK was framed by a “they’re all the same” mentality. All I saw was greed and corruption in people who didn’t represent my view of the world, but that’s just how it is, right? It’ll always be the same, we can’t change it.

But maybe we can.

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We’ve been hearing tales today of people who signed up for the top secret “public meeting” of No Glasgow yesterday and received written confirmation that their application had been successful, but were then mysteriously refused admission when they arrived – a curious occurrence when by most accounts there were 70-80 seats going begging in the 400-seater auditorium.

We, naturally, had about 50 spies in the room, one of whom audio-recorded the entire thing. We’re still plugging our way through it – it’s hard to maintain focus when the tired old platitudes you’ve heard a hundred times already drone on and on from the stage, and we keep finding we’ve forgotten we’re listening and have wandered off to do the hoovering or something.

By far the most compelling argument we’ve heard so far, though, came from a gentleman in the audience. It’s transcribed below. Take a moment to read it.

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Forgive us another rummage around in our poll data, but we didn’t do a lot of study into gender differences in our first wave of analysis, and we were struck by something this morning as we idly browsed through the question about what Scots were scared of.

Along with the fact that women were almost twice as likely – 38% to 22% – to be undecided about their referendum vote* as men (and indeed about most other votes), it was one of the areas where the differences between the sexes were most stark.

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As our Twitter followers will know, we’ve experimentally decided to reserve Saturdays for light-hearted comic banter, as a bit of relief from the serious business of politics.

Of course, this week politics has been so absurd – from “Better Together” deciding it was Better Apart to Gordon Brown promising Scots that if they vote No he’d increase their taxes and send the money to England, and the still-ongoing Faragemageddon – that it hardly seems necessary, but we’ll stick with the plan.

With that in mind, then, it’s time for… British Loony Of The Week!

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The Telegraph deserves some credit today. It runs a heartbreaking story about the reality of life on benefits, of the sort both the Conservative and Labour parties want to be “tough” on. It’s a piece of gripping, truthful and hard-hitting journalism, highly and properly critical of the party the paper steadfastly supports. Hats off to the author.

Then you read the comments.

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We’ve already asked this question on Twitter (no answers yet), but we should open it up here too. In the light of today’s piece by Stewart Bremner, we’ve been racking our brains trying to think if anyone has moved, in public, from being a Yes vote to a No – or even a Don’t Know – since, let’s say, the SNP’s victory in 2007, the point at which a referendum started to become a real possibility rather than just an abstract concept.

That’s almost six years ago now. Surely SOMEONE must have been won over by the Unionists’ arguments or by the slick, positive, coherent “Better Together” campaign? There’s no shortage of testimonies from people moving, or at least edging, the other way. Even the Sunday Mail is starting to waver a little, for Heaven’s sake.

But we haven’t heard of a single, solitary human in all those six years of intensified constitutional debate who’d previously supported independence having announced to the world that it’s a bad idea and we’re better off in the bosom of Mother UK after all.

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If you’re interested in Scottish constitutional politics, you can save yourself a lot of time and angst by reading Wings Over Scotland. The mainstream media has agonised all year over procedural aspects of the independence referendum, but we came right out and called it when some people were still sleeping off their Hogmanay hangovers:

“We’re going to nail our colours to the mast and make a plain assertion – the referendum WILL happen, and it WILL be conducted on the Scottish Government’s terms. We suspect that in the interests of appearing reasonable, Alex Salmond will concede either the inclusion of 16/17-year-olds on the franchise or the involvement of the Electoral Commission – but not both – and the UK Government will ultimately grant the Section 30 order necessary to remove any possibility of legal challenge.

(Also, after a great show of pretend reluctance and protest, the Scottish Government will accept the UK Government’s insistence that the referendum must comprise just a single question, because that’s what the SNP actually wants – it just wants the Unionist side to be the one that rules out the popular devo-max option, rather than itself, and helpfully the Unionists are playing right into nationalist hands there.)

For all the heat and fury, it will be so. You can quote us on that.”

Nine months later, guess what?

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Since we’ve already been nice to a journalist today, it seems only fair to also send out a little bit of love to the press corps’ less-celebrated and much-maligned brothers in arms – the photographers. (We don’t know why we’re being so pleasant to everyone all of a sudden. We think someone may have slipped something in our tea.)

Rangers FC has been in administration since Valentine’s Day. That’s three long months in which the story has featured in the news pretty much every single day, and it’s not a situation that lends itself particularly well to illustration. One picture of a Duff & Phelps press conference looks much like another, and once you’ve knocked out the traditional broken-club-crest it starts to get tricky to find a fresh visual angle.

The nation’s photo-journalists have risen heroically to the challenge, though, and we feel irresistibly compelled to take a moment out from our day to offer them a heartfelt and genuine salute, before whatever this stuff is wears off.

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