Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

“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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is the Guardian’s elaborate, deliberately-absurd April Fool story:

Ha ha! Good one!

Read the rest of this entry →

Read the rest of this entry →

Better Together Parklife!

The Quiz Broadcast will be on soon. Britons should REMAIN INDOORS.

David Mitchell in the Guardian, 30 March 2014:

“There’s always a chance that people will decide who to vote for according to policy – and by ‘people’, I mean the people that matter: the indecisive minority who change which party they vote for from election to election according to whim, and consequently determine every result.

But it doesn’t seem likely to me that policy is what’s going to swing the swingers this time – although I may only think that because the Labour Party’s policies are still largely secret.”

People only vote for change if they think there’ll actually be some.

Building into a thrilling partwork!

(When we’ve done all 12 of these we’ll be compiling them into a single massive post for easy reference, but it might have been a bit much to handle in one sudden burst.)

Read the rest of this entry →

From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

Read the rest of this entry →

As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

Read the rest of this entry →