Wings Over Scotland

As far as we’re aware, “the largest arts festival in Europe” (indeed, the largest arts festival anywhere in the world) is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Does anyone remember Ian Murray MP being in charge of it?

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Sorry, folks, but it looks like we’re going to have to do this all over again. In the light of last night’s bizarre revelations about Scottish Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals, even the barest semblance of coherence in the party’s plans has disintegrated, with Coatbridge MP Tom Clarke flatly contradicting the form letters sent out by numerous other MPs and MSPs over the last few days.

So once more we may have to ask you to drop your elected member another wee line and see if we can’t get this properly cleared up once and for all.

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Our email inbox this week has been packed with people sending in their Labour MP’s or MSP’s responses to our questions about the party’s proposals for the devolution of taxation (aka “Devo Nano”) in the event of a No vote.

With the exception of the very first reply – an arrogant, rude, dismissive effort from Tom Harris – until this evening all of them have been the exact same text except for minor variations in the introductory sentences, with some members choosing to insert little digs at this site but others being more polite to their constituents.

But tonight everything changed.

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When presented with the evidence that Scotland has been a huge net contributor to UK finances ever since the discovery of North Sea oil, Unionists sometimes protest “Ah, but what about the 260 years before that, when Scotland was just a poor wee backwater with no industry that was bankrolled by England after the Darien disaster?”

(Because most of them don’t actually know the first thing about Darien.)

And after this morning’s story, we thought it might be worth checking a few more of the official UK government figures for Scottish revenues and expenditure, up to the point where the Treasury stopped compiling the figures lest they get too embarrassing.

So thanks to yet another alert reader, that’s what we did.

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Bill Jamieson in the Scotsman today:

“Yes, there should be No poll abuse

The independence debate has been getting ever nastier and it’s time for all sides to take a breath.”

It must have been a short breath, because just six paragraphs later:

“Bill Munro, the head of Barrhead Travel, one of our most successful Scottish companies, was subjected to a volley of threats and abuse after he advised staff in a letter to vote No.

A line has been crossed here between fair rebuttal and menacing nastiness. More of this and we could be on the way towards a Caledonian Kristallnacht.”

Because a surefire way to calm debate is to liken one side to the Nazis, right?

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Sent in by an alert reader from a 1971 book called “Scotland’s Scrap Of Paper”.

Same as it ever was, eh readers?

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The mystery of the alleged vandalism attack by “Yes supporters” on the office of Labour MP Ian Murray in Edinburgh this week has turned into quite a labyrinth.

We rang Mr Murray’s office this morning, speaking to a nice chap called Stuart (or Stewart, we forgot to ask), who declined to elaborate on the nature of the alleged vandalism but told us that Mr Murray had seen our story and would get back to us.

Below are the questions we’ll be trying to clear up.

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We noticed a rather unusual story on Conservative Home on Monday. “One in five party members want Scotland to leave the United Kingdom” ran the headline above a piece about a survey the site had conducted.

In fact the title was an understatement – 22% of respondents who were Conservative Party members had answered Yes even to the somewhat loaded proposition “I want Scotland to become an independent country, and leave the United Kingdom”.

The numbers got even more dramatic when extended to the site’s readers as a whole (not just signed-up party members), with a whopping 30% agreeing with the statement.

And obviously, there’s something quite interesting about those numbers.

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“Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling is in today’s Telegraph, yet again demanding that people should be prevented from expressing opinions on the internet, unless those opinions are supportive of the Union. In Mr Darling’s world, businessmen should be permitted to try to frighten their employees into voting No with mad, untrue rants and veiled threats that they’d be voting themselves onto the dole, but anyone responding to the threat with “Shut up, grandad” must be censored and silenced.

So far, so ho hum – if Unionist politicians are whining about “cybernats”, there must be a Y in the day, is the general rule. But as we can see above, the former Chancellor wasn’t the only Labour MP bleating about terrible Nat bully boys today.

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As alert Wings reader may recall, I work for a charity in the Borders. Our volunteer who does the Monday-morning food run up the Nith valley is away in Asia and Australia for a month, so my week now starts with a ride up the A76. The countryside is drop-dead gorgeous, particularly in the early morning when the newly risen sun paints the peaks of the hills all kind of glowing colours.

But the beaten up towns of the valley are like refugees. Only a few decades ago towns like Sanquhar and Kirkconnel had a genuine reason to exist. They mined coal. They helped keep everyone’s lights on. Then everything changed as Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill played out their poker game which eventually consigned places like Sanquhar and Kirkconnel to the scrap heap of history.

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A Yes vote in the independence referendum would elevate Scotland to the top of the world political agenda for one reason and one reason only: the fact that the UK’s entire nuclear arsenal would unavoidably be located in a foreign country for years. Everything else about the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK – currency sharing, borders, taxation – is subordinate to that simple and critical fact.

The UK’s serious-minded and capable Defence Secretary Philip Hammond told Andrew Marr on Sunday that he “didn’t think” it was he who had told the Guardian, a couple of days beforehand, that Scotland would be able to currency-share with the UK.

You can take that any way you like, but he also pointed out that he’d just spent the week in Washington DC.

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