Wings Over Scotland

Later this morning the Queen will launch a vessel named after herself at the Rosyth naval dockyards. Earlier, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, appeared on the BBC News channel dripping in gold braid and medals to revel in the delivery of his shiny new toy, or at least the hull of it.

(Rather crassly Sir George claimed that it was being given the name of not just the current monarch but “both our Queen Elizabeths”, even though Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elizabeth and the ship itself tactfully avoids adding a “II” on the end.)

In what was an all-round virtuoso display of foot-shooting, the esteemed Admiral was also keen to point out just how few jobs would be supported by HMS Big Grey Floating Car Park – which won’t actually carry any fighter jets until 2020 – noting that “this ship only has 600 people aboard… that is a fraction of previous vessels of this size”.

And that got us to thinking.

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Louise Morton is the Vice Chair of Moray Labour Party. She’s already familiar to some of our more veteran and alert readers for laughing when Yes activists were intimidated out of campaigning at a local fair with threats of violence.

Less than two days after Labour’s hapless candidate for the Westminster seat of Angus resigned for likening some children at a peaceful protest to the Hitler Youth, Ms Morton – whose son Sean is the party’s 2015 candidate for the Moray seat – thought it’d be a wizard jape to tweet this:

It’s like a disease, readers. They can’t keep a lid on their hatred to save their lives.

Jill Stephenson is (or maybe was) Professor Emerita of Modern German History at the University of Edinburgh. She was the subject of a substantial profile piece in the Times a couple of months ago on the subject of the independence campaign, which called her “one of the most compelling voices in support of the Union” (as well as somewhat inflating her status to just “Professor Emerita of History”), and therefore we must take her to be a respectable commentator who wouldn’t tell crude flat-out lies.

So we were intrigued to notice the above tweet from yesterday. Can anyone point us to Professor Curtice actually making such a claim? It would surely be significant if the country’s leading (and apparently only) psephologist had indeed said that Yes voters were just a bunch of thickos. At the very least it would somewhat colour his analysis, which we’ve hitherto always considered professional and impartial.

We’ve got to pop out for a bit, so any help would be appreciated.

Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)

The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.

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About 11 minutes and 30 seconds into last night’s Scotland 2014, Labour MP Gemma Doyle repeated one of the strangest arguments Labour use against independence. Having first denied that she’d ever seen any polls suggesting that the people of Scotland wanted to get rid of the Trident nuclear weapons system, she then fell back on the curious but much-used Labour line that getting rid of it would only move it “100 miles or so down the road”, and therefore be pointless.

There are all sorts of glaringly obvious flaws in that argument. One is the de facto case that the UK actually has nowhere else it can put Trident, and therefore if Scotland expels it the rUK will become a non-nuclear-weapons state by default.

The second is that even if there was somewhere for it to go, Scotland still wouldn’t be paying for it any more, which would be a huge benefit to the Scottish budget and a pretty good reason entirely aside from the moral and safety issues.

And the third is that Gemma Doyle doesn’t appear to know where England is.

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The Guardian has a story today about what Herald journalist Paul Hutcheon pithily described yesterday as Jim Murphy MP’s “100 day tour of Scottish Labour activists”, which we’ve previously featured on this site.

But we were contacted by an alert reader who made a point echoed by one of the replies to Hutcheon’s tweet – doesn’t Mr Murphy already have a full-time job?

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Most newspapers have a story today about the resignation of Labour parliamentary candidate Kathy Wiles after her long history of abusive and offensive comments on social media was exposed on this site on Monday and Tuesday.

The BBC, STV, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, Express, Times, Courier and most others all report the story to varying degrees of accuracy, and most of the pieces are all but identical, featuring the same quotes. (Only the Telegraph declines to mention it, perhaps out of embarrassment over this unfortunately-timed, one-sided Alan Cochrane rant about “cybernats” on the same day Ms Wiles caught everyone’s attention.)

As the local paper of the would-be MP for Angus the Courier’s coverage is the best, with not only the standard resignation story but also a slightly deeper delve into her lengthy record of nasty postings and an editorial leader column, which is the only place we’ve seen raise the more important question arising from the incident.

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Honest Alistair Darling, interviewed by the BBC in 2008.

Smooth.

There’s some very strange counting going on in the Times today. Firstly the paper carries a story about a survey of potential shale gas deposits in the central belt, and arrives at a very gloomy conclusion (“Modest deposits shake hope of shale bonanza”):

“Scotland has a modest amount of shale gas and oil reserves but far less than are believed to be in the north of England, a new report has revealed.

The official British Geological Survey (BGS) analysis estimates that there are six billion barrels of oil and 80 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas across the central belt of Scotland which includes Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The potential shale gas reserves are a fraction of what scientists have said are in the Bowland area of northern England where it is estimated that 1,300tcf of gas exists beneath the ground. The UK already uses 3 tcf of gas every year.”

Hold on a minute. We’re not fans of fracking, but 80 trillion cubic feet? If the UK uses 3 tcf of gas a year, presumably Scotland, with 8.4% of the population, uses roughly 0.25 tcf a year. 80 tcf into 0.25 tcf suggests that the shale gas thought to be in the central belt would cover Scotland’s use for 320 years, which seems quite a lot.

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The Guardian, 1 July 2014:

“Many British people will never afford an acceptable minimum living standard

The chances of people on low incomes affording a decent life, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, have dramatically reduced.

There’s the convenient political fantasy that low-paid work is a guaranteed route out of hardship. Yet austerity and recession means that the “couple-with-two-kids” would need to earn 46% more than they did in 2008 to reach the Minimum Income Standard threshold (wages have risen by just 9% over that period).

Lower income working families have typically lost four times as much from cuts to in-work benefits as they have gained in tax allowances.”

Every rock that we look under near Labour’s newest Westminster candidate Kathy Wiles – who thinks that 7-year-olds taking part in a peaceful Yes protest are akin to the Hitler Youth, and that “most” SNP voters are benefit scroungers – sees lots more nasty little cockroaches skittering out and running from the sudden influx of light.

But despite setting a high bar with the comments above, Ms Wiles keeps clearing it.

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From yesterday’s Evening Express:

“Out of work Scots had their benefits sanctioned on almost 900,000 occasions last year, a new report has claimed.

A total of 898,000 sanctions were applied to claims for jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) and employment support allowance (ESA) during 2013, according to Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS), with 871,000 of the penalties being applied to claims for JSA.

One man in the east of Scotland had his benefits reduced to about £11 a week after sanctions were applied when he failed to attend an interview with a work programme, despite producing a doctor’s certificate to say he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was not fit to travel, the report stated. “

It’s probably appropriate to remember at this point that Labour have promised to be even tougher on welfare than the current coalition should they be elected in 2015. But there’s something very alarming about those stats.

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