Wings Over Scotland

There’s a strange phenomenon at the heart of Scottish politics, and it runs far deeper than the independence referendum. It’s summed up pretty well in this image.

The picture and the comment alongside come from the Facebook page of Labour’s newest Parliamentary candidate, Kathy Wiles. They were made more than two months ago, so you’d imagine that any selection committee worth even a quarter of a damn would have checked her out enough to have a look at her social-media accounts and see if she might have said – or be likely to say in future – anything stupid.

But the thing is, we’re sure they did. Because as far as Scottish Labour as concerned, calling “most” of the voters of the most popular party in the country a bunch of workshy scroungers only interested in claiming benefits isn’t even a gaffe. It’s pretty much the official policy position.

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At the weekend, hundreds of people (estimates of the actual number, as is traditional, varied wildly according to who was counting) protested against BBC bias at the state broadcaster’s Pacific Quay headquarters in Glasgow. There was a very great amount of sneering on social media among No campaigners and journalists at the peaceful, good-natured gathering, for such is the character of No campaigners and journalists.

A small group of readers of this site were among those who attended the protest. They were carrying a Wings Over Scotland banner, and some people had photographs taken with it, which naturally led to more sneering, such as this:

So far so unremarkable. That’s a jibe aimed at me rather than the wee kids in the pic, and I’m fair game. But then a gang of usual-suspects No types piled in on Labour and “Better Together” activist Hothersall’s tweet, and things got a little ugly.

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It feels almost insulting to you to even mention this, readers, so we’ll be brief.

“Balls seeks to reassure business by pledging to maintain low rate of corporation tax

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One of the features of the independence debate as covered by the Scottish and UK media has been the casual lie. We’re not talking about screaming banner front-page headlines here, but the passing, offhand untruths slipped into articles that are primarily about something else, or tiny little corner-of-a-page pieces so trivial that readers absorb the falsehood in seconds and move on.

We covered a good example of the latter last week, and it’s repeated in this morning’s Times, in a piece which makes the flatly and diametrically untrue assertion that “experts” have “produced figures suggesting that the final cost [of setting up an independent Scotland] could be £1.5 billion”, when the reality is that the only expert who has produced figures has explicitly rubbished that number.

But it’s another article in the same paper that made us smile wryly.

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It seems somehow fitting that there was a political battle in Stirling yesterday. The city was host to two sets of military-themed festivities, with the UK government having decided to hold Armed Forces Day there in a move transparently aimed at wrecking the commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn.

The anniversary was obviously on an immovable date and location, but the Labour-Tory coalition that runs Stirling Council, and which last year attempted to replace a Saltire which flies over the statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce with a Union Jack – a plan it abandoned after it was highlighted by this site – agreed to host the competing festival on the same weekend.

Armed Forces Day had free admission to undermine the relatively pricey Bannockburn event. Labour even went so far as to actively try to put people off attending the latter, with Glasgow MP Ian Davidson suggesting that the commemoration was nothing more than a glorification of “the murder of hundreds of thousands of English people”. (These particular “people” being an invading army, actual English casualties around 10,000.)

The press covered the subsequent downsizing of the historical recreation with glee, with numerous articles reporting low ticket sales and other problems right up to the eve of the show, which appeared about to be a major flop.

But then something odd happened.

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Julie Webster of the Maryhill Food Bank, quoted in the Evening Times, 28 June 14:

“I have worked in social work for 20 years, so I am pretty hardened but we had a family come in on a Tuesday at 3pm having not eaten since the ­previous Friday.

There had been a problem with benefits and because it was a Bank Holiday weekend the mum had no money for food for her or her two children.

I watched the mum pick up and put down can after can, wondering what she doing, before I realised she was looking for one with a ring pull.

She ripped the top off and starting eating the beans with her hands, she was so hungry. At that point I had to go to the toilets and have a cry.”

The best of both worlds. As good as it gets. UK OK. Better together. No thanks.

Our secret agent in the No camp’s taken a real risk to bring you this one, readers. Smuggled out under cover of dusk, we’ve managed to get hold of the early rushes of the first ever combined referendum TV and cinema broadcast on behalf of the Unionist parties and the main campaigning organisations.

As you can see, they’re turning up the fear. Don’t have nightmares.

An angry Dennis Canavan gets stuck into Ian Murray, the Labour MP who calls the police when someone puts a sticker on his window, on “Good Morning Scotland”.

For our money the most telling part is when Murray bleats about the SNP proposing a cut to Corporation Tax, and Canavan quite rightly points out the hypocrisy given that Labour reduced it twice when last in power and pledged to reduce it even further as soon as possible, Murray runs away from the issue without addressing it, but then has the brass neck to bring it up again at the end.

We think this is how Ed actually sees it.

Because remember, readers, nationalism is a virus.

So, this afternoon’s big story is that the son of Holocaust refugees (campaigning on the same side as Holocaust deniers), is threatening to put a whole race of people in a ghetto by building a barbed-wire fence and guard posts across their only land border?

Have we got that right?

Until relatively recently I was very firmly of the mind that Scotland shouldn’t be independent. Born in England to English parents but growing up in Scotland since I was a baby, I was English to the Scottish and Scottish to the English. I’ve always considered myself British and still do. Not in a nationalistic way, just a matter of fact.

In 2008 while in my second year at university I started an anti-independence Facebook group as a misguided joke, calling it ‘I Hate Alex Salmond’. I actually didn’t hate Alex Salmond, I’ve actually always thought he was a good politician, I just didn’t agree with some of what he stood for (and of course, one thing in particular).

So following a bit of negative press and some pressure from the university, I decided to change the name of the group to ‘No to Scottish Independence’. And then, gradually, some other things started to change too.

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