Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers can’t have failed to notice a certain reticence on the part of Scottish Labour to clarify key aspects of their shambolic proposals for further devolution in the event of a No vote.

(In response to our latest enquiries, genetically-programmed Central Scotland list MSP Siobhan McMahon sent a Wings reader a letter at the weekend directing them to the “Devo Nano” report – which doesn’t address any of the issues that were actually raised by her constituent – and saying “I believe that I have now adequately responded to your queries and have nothing further to add.”)

But it turns out there ARE people they’re prepared to tell the truth to.

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Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. Playing with fire
The No campaign turns ugly. Okay, more ugly.

2. Neither national nor collective
Some particularly audacious “Better Together” lies about the NHS.

3. People are strange
The most curious results from our third Panelbase poll.

4. Fine-tuning the news
The Scotsman edits itself into a bit of a pickle.

5. The mushroom farm
The story of the Queen’s Scottish coronation that never was.

This week’s theme: rewriting history.

One of the great things about this site’s sky-high viewing figures is that on the rare occasions when we might be, for example, out having a walk in the park to get over the crushing disappointment of somehow losing yet another Scottish Cup semi-final, our ever-vigilant readers will remain alert.

Otherwise, we might have missed this.

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The pitch:

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We’re off to watch the Scottish Cup semi-final now, so to keep you all entertained for the next couple of hours here’s a little something we put together at the request of columnist and broadcaster Lesley Riddoch, and for anyone who was listening to Radio Scotland’s “Headlines” this morning.

Hopefully we won’t need it ourselves by 3.30pm. #COYR

Even Sparta’s mythical iron-bar currency – specifically designed, so legend had it, to shackle the economy by being too heavy to buy or trade anything – was marginally better, in Alistair Darling’s view, than anything an independent Scotland might be able to use for money, all of which will lead to inevitable doom.

Because Scotland, as all good unionists know, is the only country in world history for which there is no currency option that will work at all.

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Have you seen the film of the coronation? I’m not talking about the grand televised extravaganza in Westminster Abbey with the young Queen Elizabeth done up like a wedding cake – I mean the Scottish coronation, in Edinburgh, three weeks after the glamorous London ceremony of 2 June 1953.

It’s not easy to locate. You’ll struggle to find a picture of it, or even a documented reference – a brief casual mention squeezed in right at the end of this article on the monarchical website is the best we could do.

Acting on the advice of her ministers, Elizabeth attended the ceremony dressed in an ordinary coat and hat. The honours of Scotland were presented to her, and she held them as if they were volatile explosive devices, standing stock-still until they were taken back again by be-gowned flunkies. 

There would be no actual official crowning. It might give the natives ideas.

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Dear Scottish women,

It seems that we’re letting the side down a bit here. If the same percentage of us were willing to vote Yes as the men, we’d be home and dry come September 18th, living in a nuclear-weapon-free democracy for the first time in our lives. But it seems like a lot of us are either not convinced or haven’t begun thinking about it yet.

I don’t believe it’s the former: anyone genuinely looking at the arguments, not to mention the behaviour of those on both sides of the debate, could hardly fail to be convinced that independence is a good thing. So I’m guessing it might be the latter.

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We didn’t do a stats post at the start of April (still just under 4m pageviews a month, if you’re curious) but when someone tweeted these figures this morning we thought they were worth a wee toot, because they’re more than just nice news for us.

They’re from the independent web-traffic analysis site Alexa.com, and they detail the relative rankings for the seven biggest dedicated Scottish politics sites on the web.

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The last batch of data from our Panelbase poll concerns social attitudes, away from directly party-political issues. We did a whole bunch of these last time, with a mixture of predictable and unexpected results, and Scots had a surprise or two for us again.

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