Wings Over Scotland

They say that men think about sex every six seconds. Apparently Jenny Marra thinks about Alex Salmond every 12, as she manages to get his name into this 48-second clip from last night’s BBC Scotland debate no fewer than four times, though the question was about reducing poverty by saving money on aircraft carriers and Trident.

We still don’t really understand why Labour think focusing their entire political strategy on personally attacking the most popular politician in the country is a smart ploy, but far be it from us to tell them their job when it’s been such a success for them so far.

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Last month we carried a view of the Scottish independence debate from the Canadian province of Quebec. Today we hear from the English-speaking side of the country.

In English-speaking Canada, few people seem to be aware of Scotland’s independence referendum. It doesn’t register much in the papers, much less our cheerfully oblivious TV news. The couple of friends I’ve told about it were interested, but mainly viewed the event as they would the World Cup: a distant, if intriguing, foreign phenomenon.

Conversely, Scotland’s view of Canada has been quite the opposite. Commentators on both the Yes and No sides have drawn explicit parallels with the Canadian experience, especially Quebec’s fraught history of referenda and sovereignty debate.

As a Canadian-American who’s spent a good deal of time south of the border, however, I think there’s a much more apt comparison to be made.

Canada’s bizarre love-hate relationship with our dysfunctional, arrogant, yet somehow still likeable neighbours and friends in the United States of America is both cautionary and optimistic. And it indicates the absolute need for a Yes vote.

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The Electoral Commission has this afternoon released the first of four sets of data about cash contributions and loans to referendum campaigning organisations, this one comprising information about donations over £7,500.

Having complained bitterly just a couple of months ago about being the “underdog” because “the Yes camp have more financial firepower”, Blair McDougall’s “Better Together” has trousered over £2.4m from rich business donors, whereas Yes Scotland has collected under £1.2m, almost all of it from lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

Those making gifts to various arms of the No campaign include the mysterious Rain Dance Investments (£200,000) – a company with no website, which appears to be based in an eight-bedroomed house in a small village in Lincoln which also seems to be home to numerous other companies.

Our favourites, though, without question, are the Stalbury Trustees.

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Andrew Nicoll in the Scottish Sun, 7 July 2014:

“The summer break means there are now only nine sitting days of the Scottish Parliament left before the big independence vote.

It also means I’ve more time on my hands to catch up with stuff, like a fascinating report from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre looking at how Scotland has changed since we first hosted the Commonwealth Games, back in 1970.

Take shipbuilding, for example. There are endless dire warnings that shipbuilding will be killed off by independence. All I can say is that, reading this report, the UK has already had a damned good try.

In 1970 Scotland’s shipbuilding industry employed 34,000 people, with 10,000 jobs in Glasgow alone. When the Games returned to Edinburgh in 1986, we had 25,000 shipbuilders and now there are just 6,000, half of them in Glasgow.

That doesn’t sound to me like a recipe for success.”

Our emphasis. The full report can be read here.

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To be honest, readers, when we’re busy, which is always, we have a tendency to stop reading newspaper stories by the time they get to the quote from a “Better Together” or UK government spokesman. It’s not exactly tricky to predict what they’re going to say, and in the case of the former it’ll usually be some boorish, juvenile sneer that just makes us depressed.

But last night we happened to get all the way to the end of a Scotsman article (we were surprised too), and noticed something that was a more blatant lie than usual.

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Channel 4 has now aired its Dispatches programme about “intimidation”, in which a lot of grown adults from the cut-throat world of business whined about possible vague hints they may or may not have picked up that the Scottish Government would rather they kept quiet about independence.

The estimable Lallands Peat Worrier skewers the subject brilliantly here, so we shan’t detain ourselves further with the specifics – other than to passingly note that as Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine tweeted during the show, one of the alleged victims was so frightened and cowed into submission that he’s currently suing the Scottish Government at the European Court about something else entirely.

But there was something else that had us puzzled.

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Earlier today we referred to a story from the Sunday Times, picked up by some of the tabloids this morning, about how Scotland manager Jock Stein tried to cancel a World Cup scouting trip to New Zealand in 1982 in a panic because he feared that Margaret Thatcher was about to start a nuclear war over the Falklands.

It seems remiss not to note a chilling passage from the original ST piece.

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Scottish playwright Peter Arnott on his blog last month:

“The very core of the fear in ‘Project Fear’ is fear of English vengeance.  All the stuff about trade barriers and borders and passports and no one ever buying whisky again are predicated on the same thing: on the apparently inevitable consequence that they will hurt us if we dare.  

This expectation which informs all the dire prognostications of economic boycotts and general administrative bloody mindedness, even of proper fisticuffs over the assets – is based on an image of the English as petty, spiteful, nasty and vengeful.

The No campaign seem certain that the majority stakeholders in the ‘greatest multinational family’ in history will react like vindictive children.”

Cheers to Wings contributor Simon Varwell for the tip-off.

Most people only read one daily newspaper, if that. We, for our sins, read almost all of them, and if you do that you learn stuff that other people don’t know.

Firstly, you spot how many agency stories pop up in multiple papers, repeated almost or actually identical, word-for-word. (Though it can also be fascinating to see which paragraphs sometimes get left out.) And secondly, you find out how many stories aren’t the result of journalism, but of one paper’s hack reading something in another paper the day before, lifting the quotes and presenting it to readers as their own story.

(Occasionally they’ll deign to credit the original source, eg “such-and-such made the comments in the Guardian yesterday”, but more often they won’t bother, and will just write “said in an interview” or similar.)

And as with the agency pieces, it’s interesting to note which stories DON’T get stolen.

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The thinktank Reform Scotland is no mouthpiece for the Yes campaign. Wikipedia notes that it’s “a sister organisation to the London-based right-wing, free market think tank Reform”, and in fact it’s closely involved with the forgotten “Devo Plus” campaign group created by politicians from the Unionist parties. Devo Plus itself is endorsed by “Better Together”, to the extent that BT celebrated DP’s birthday last year.

So we were pretty interested when Reform Scotland board member Professor Sir Donald Mackay appeared in today’s Sunday Times rubbishing the UK government’s pessimistic projections for an independent Scotland’s oil revenues, and suggesting that in fact a more realistic figure was more than TWICE the one being claimed by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

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The two arguments heard most often from voters who are leaning towards No (that is, discounting the diehard BritNats who’d vote for the Union no matter what) are “we need more facts” and “we’d like Scotland to be independent but there wouldn’t be the money to pay for it and we don’t want to have higher taxes”.

The first of those is a red herring, successfully propagated by the No campaign with the willing assistance of the media in order to create doubt and fear. There are, by definition, no such things as “facts” about the future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, regardless of whether Scotland votes Yes or No.

The next Westminster election, for example, could easily see the UK vote to leave the European Union by 2017, a change which would beyond question be far more dramatic and disastrous than any plausible outcome of  Scottish independence.

The second argument, though, we can do something about.

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There was an article on independence in the Huffington Post yesterday, which we’ve only just seen. Penned by one Dr Nicholas M Almond, a “cognitive neuropsychologist and author” who also has cerebral palsy – a physically debilitating condition but one which doesn’t affect mental capacity in any way – we think it may, word for word, be the most spectacularly ill-informed and offensively moronic article on the subject of Scotland ever to appear in a recognised and vaguely respectable publication.

For fun, we thought we’d count the errors.

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