Wings Over Scotland

As readers of this site will be well aware, 40 years ago the UK government economist Professor Gavin McCrone analysed the effect of North Sea oil on the finances of a notional independent Scotland, which at the time seemed a real and possibly even imminent prospect. His assessment was so alarming to Westminster that its findings had to be kept secret from the Scottish public for over three decades.

With the information suppressed, Scotland remained in the UK (and was even refused modest devolution despite voting for it in a referendum), resulting in the imposition of a series of Conservative governments elected on English votes, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s turning-point victory in 1979.

Ironically, we have Mrs Thatcher’s government to thank for the collation of the data which demonstrates the true state of Scotland’s finances within the UK, in the shape of the GERS figures (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland).

The data was subsequently collected into the Scottish National Accounts Project, which provides the figures (Excel document) for the following analysis. What it reveals provides a surprisingly unambiguous statement of Scotland’s financial condition, and one which is agreed across a broader political spectrum that you might imagine.

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This is what goes on behind the closed doors of invitation-only events run by the No campaign. Here, the former PM and self-proclaimed “ex-politician” lies through his teeth (again) to a Fife audience in June, presumably hoping they’ve by now forgotten his incompetent reign as Chancellor – the massive pensions raid, the cut-price sell-off of the nation’s gold, the ending of the 10p tax rate and all the rest, and the calamitous economic crisis he bequeathed to the nation:

Apparently oil revenues will be the sole source of money for an independent Scotland. No taxes at all. Apparently they’re only “£3 billion a year”, even though they’ve in fact NEVER been as low as £3bn since the Scottish Parliament existed and most sensible projections put receipts for the next few years at an average of at least twice that.

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Sir Ian Wood quoted in the Scotsman late last year:

“A radical overhaul of the North Sea oil industry can deliver a £200 billion injection to the economy over the next 20 years, a major report has concluded.

Oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood has led the biggest independent review of the North Sea oil and gas industry in its history, and said yesterday that production could increase by four billion barrels over coming years if major changes to the operation of the oil and gas sector are made.

Such changes would put the UK in a ‘stronger position’ to extract nearly all of the estimated 24 billion barrels still remaining underneath the North Sea.”

Unfortunately, since then there’s been a cataclysm.

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An alert reader drew our attention to a piece in the Telegraph on Monday.

“The pro-UK Better Together campaign said it plans to “turn majority support into a majority vote” by contacting every household at least three times over the next month and every undecided voter at least four times.

Up to a million postal voters will be contacted and more than 25,000 activists will be working to mobilise support for No ahead of polling day. The campaign will also be using advertising on websites such as Facebook to reach 500,000 undecided women.”

Lordy, where to start?

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As we’ve already noted this morning, today’s newspapers “reveal” something this site told you nine months ago – that a No vote in the independence referendum will see Scotland punished with a massive cut to its budget.

But some voters still don’t really know what the “Barnett Formula” is or how it works, so it seemed worth putting together a concise step-by-step guide to how it’ll be used to steal billions of pounds from Scots, should they vote next month to leave control of their affairs with Westminster.

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(Click here to help keep this vital news outlet broadcasting.)

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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 Times of London (to give it its full title) has been the newspaper of record for the British establishment for 226 years. It was practically the only facet of British life that survived in the dystopian future of George Orwell’s “1984”. Even though it’s now owned by an Australian/American, the brand remains one of the most recognised and iconic symbols of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom, revered across the globe.

(It even created the “Times Roman” font which is the default standard typeface of the English-speaking world, and which these words you’re reading now are displayed in.)

Which means there’s absolutely no excuse for this sort of cobblers.

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Folks, we seriously sometimes think we’re the only people covering Scottish politics who can actually read. Here’s a page from the Scottish Sun this morning:

The paper, last seen struggling to subtract 4 from 5, makes a big and rather huffy point about this apparently being “the first time” that the First Minister has “admitted” that independence won’t be a walk in the park, “with whisky and oil on tap”.

So we have to wonder what the heck they’ve been doing for the last 14 months.

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Earlier today we highlighted some rather ugly tweets (and retweets) from the No campaign’s latest “grassroots” star, Yvonne Hama of Airdrie, who’s apparently a big fan of the BNP’s Nick Griffin and the idea of hanging Catholics from trees.

Within hours of the revelations her Twitter accounts had all been deleted and her blog on the “Better Together” website and Facebook page removed, with a BT spokesman telling The Drum magazine that “views like this are completely unacceptable”.

So we imagine there were red faces all round when this happened just hours later.

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Help. We’ve been absolutely swamped in demand for The Wee Blue Book. (We’re not ignoring emails, just using them to put together a database for distribution.) We’ve used the proceeds of our mindbogglingly successful fundraiser to get 250,000 copies thundering through the print presses as we speak, but an order that size takes quite a while, and the full run probably won’t be in our depots across the country until the end of the month, though we should have a preliminary batch of 20,000 out before that.

But we’ve also been deluged with requests from people and local groups looking for sources and advice on how to print some of their own, so if you just can’t wait, an alert reader has tracked down what we think must be an unbeatable price.

StuPrint.com (no relation, honest) will knock up 6,000 copies from our print-ready PDF file, turned round in a speedy 4-5 days, for an exceptionally reasonable £1,590 all in – there’s no VAT on books. You can contact them for a quote on smaller orders.

If that’s more than you need, there are other options to get going right away.

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