Wings Over Scotland

We dropped our contact at Ladbrokes an innocent line last night enquiring why we could no longer find the bet they were offering just a fortnight ago with odds of 50/1 on an independent Scotland NOT using Sterling. Hey, it was worth a try.

They emailed back saying that the bet had been suspended due to the BBC/Guardian news story, but later this morning it resurfaced with new odds.

Click to enlarge if you can’t make it out. That’s curious, isn’t it?

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The Guardian, 27 January 2014:

“Yes Scotland sheds more senior staff as funding doubts reemerge.

The five executive directors hired to run the official independence campaign have all now gone, adding to questions about its direction and spending power”

The Herald, 26 January 2014:

“Yes Scotland last night denied it was in meltdown after losing the last two members of its self-styled “top team” of directors. The pro-Union Better Together movement claimed Yes Scotland was ‘in crisis’. The changes come amid persistent rumours – always denied – that Yes Scotland is suffering from financial problems.”

Sounds like Yes Scotland is pretty strapped for cash, right?

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We’re still trying to get our heads around the most recent developments (that haven’t actually developed yet) in the independence debate. For a No campaign that’s been based almost entirely – and at least partly effectively – on endless scaremongering about “uncertainty”, the defenders of the Union suddenly seem to be going out of their way to sweep it aside.

Ever since the UK government’s announcement that it would be responsible for all UK debt, it’s been clear that Westminster simply couldn’t continue to resist the pressure from business to put an end to at least some of the doubt that the government itself had created. But we’re still bemused about the timing of the apparent intervention George Osborne will apparently make tomorrow.

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Good grief. We take our eyes off the ball for a couple of hours to watch a creepy movie (warning: spoilers) on a quiet Tuesday night and everything goes bananas. We’re hearing some stunned reactions to some programme the BBC put out, but we’ll have to wait to catch up on that one – the big story, for some reason coming out in the middle of the night, is that all the UK parties are going to finally definitively rule out a currency union between the rUK and an independent Scotland.

We’ll believe that one when it actually happens, readers. Because if they do, we can only assume that they’ve all got some sort of referendum death wish. Either that, or our side’s got a secret assassin in the heart of the No campaign.

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We always feel a bit bad when we point out in the interests of reality that Labour isn’t going to win the 2015 general election, because notwithstanding the fact that they’re only actually about 1% to the left of the Tories, 1% is still better than nothing.

And as we’re having a bit of an Ed Miliband day today, we thought we should do something constructive for the millionaire leader of the People’s Party for balance, so we’ve put together a nice picture gallery of Not Very Red Ed to show how at ease he is meeting members of the public, and how if he gets elected he’ll be closely in touch with the concerns of ordinary hard-working people.

Take comfort, readers. The Milibot 3000 is ++ ON YOUR SIDE ++.

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Anas Sarwar in the Sunday Post, 9 February 2014:

“Labour won’t look to switch powers over inheritance or corporation tax.

We do not want a race to the bottom on corporation tax where big business benefits and the workers on the shopfloor don’t. That might be nationalist politics, Conservative politics, not ours.”

Oh, Anas. Cutting corporation tax isn’t Labour politics? Are you sure about that?

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Labour Uncut, 11 February 2014:

“In the main race between Labour and the Tories, these figures mean the Tories have a higher core vote than Labour.

Applying the defection rate to the Tories 2010 total gives a core vote of 23%, 1.5% ahead of Labour. It could well be that the generational churn identified by the Fabians evens out this Tory advantage, but in terms of actual voters who participated at the last election, YouGov’s analysis shows us that the Tories have a clear core vote lead.”

It may be worth remembering that these figures also don’t, as far as we can ascertain, factor in those UKIP voters likely to return to the Conservatives when it comes to the crunch of a UK election that might install Ed Miliband as Prime Minister rather than a Tory leader promising to hold a referendum on EU membership.

Don’t come crying to us in May 2015, No voters. We keep telling you what’s coming.

Apologies to readers who’ve been having comments vanish or their details being forgotten this morning. This is as a result of a security measure implemented by our webhosts, because the site is under what they describe as a “targeted” DoS attack.

It’s been going on for some time now (since almost exactly the point when the Scottish Daily Mail began its “cybernats” smear campaign), and although our hosts keep shutting it down, it just starts up again from a new IP address. It’s aimed very specifically at Wings Over Scotland. Someone REALLY wants this site taken down.

We’re working on several things to try to deal with the problem more permanently, and will get everything back to normal as soon as possible, but your comments aren’t just disappearing – what’s happening is that they’re being posted, but the site is being very heavily cached to reduce the damage done by the DDoS attack, so you won’t be able to see them for a while, although other people will.

It’s all a bit of a pain, but try to see it as a compliment.

Good news in this morning’s papers for faithful Labour left-wingers everywhere.

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As we always say, we don’t set a lot of store by polls at this stage. We didn’t get all overexcited by the ones showing big jumps towards independence in the last couple of weeks, and nor are we downcast by the newest Panelbase showing a small drop.

But there WAS something interesting and potentially significant about it.

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We’ve been talking about our own stats a little too much for our liking recently – we’ll give it a bit of a rest again after this month, honest. But this one’s kinda special.

Those are Wings Over Scotland’s lifetime stats – or at least, lifetime since we signed up to Google Analytics just under two years ago. And as of yesterday, they show that the site has been visited by more than a MILLION different readers over that period. And we’re damned if we’re not taking a moment to reflect on that one.

It’s been quite a ride so far. Let’s make it mean something.

We’ve speculated on a few occasions recently on the effect on Scottish public opinion of almost the entire Scottish media being owned and controlled from outside Scotland. So we thought it was time we actually put some facts and figures to it.

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