Wings Over Scotland

As we were collecting stuff for the new Repository in our Reference section, an alert reader pointed us to the thing we’re about to show you, which we hadn’t seen before. It dates from 1975 but was only released to the public a few years ago under the 30-year rule – having been kept secret by successive Labour and Conservative administrations in the intervening period – until it was retrieved by Irish journalist Tom Griffin.

It’s the minutes from a discussion between some UK government civil servants on the subject of Scottish devolution, in relation to oil revenues, and what the public should be told about them. This was Westminster’s attitude to informing the electorate when even a small amount of self-determination of Scotland was at stake. Read it and ask yourself if you think the opponents of independence are being any more honest now.

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What the heck – since it’s topical, let’s have another double-header.

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Here’s Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale today:

Except that’s not quite EVERYTHING we need to know, is it, Kezia?

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As several people have been asking in the comments, we’re sticking this on the front page to make things easier for everyone. Kindly reader Ken McDonald (not the BBC’s one, we think) has rather generously designed and commissioned some spiffy Wings car stickers entirely off his own bat, and is offering them up for free. Though we’d hope you’d all be considerate enough to send him a stamped addressed envelope.

Just drop him an email and you can sort out the details.

We got an email last night with regard to yesterday’s piece about a bizarre story in the Daily Record. We thought it was worth sharing with you. The emphasis is ours.

“I’m a lawyer and many years ago worked for the Scottish Office drafting ‘exchange cover’ contracts to deal with fluctuations in the value of currencies between parties from different countries. Sometimes the contract dealt with Swiss Francs, sometimes Deutschmarks or US Dollars and so on.

From what you have printed in your article, it seems that this is not such a contract but it does the same job another way. It makes the person sending the invoice (the contractor) send all their bills to the Scottish Government in one currency only – the pound Sterling. It also provides that they will only receive payment in Sterling. 

In other words it’s an affirmation of the use of Sterling now and in the future by the Scottish Government. I don’t know who the ‘top’ lawyer alluded to is but he or she is talking mince.

Regards, 
George Gebbie
Faculty of Advocates.”

(“Mince” is an obscure legal term. You wouldn’t understand.)

That’s the best you’re getting for a 10 o’clock joke tonight, we’re afraid. We’ve been beavering away expanding the Reference page this evening, with the result that it now contains a new section – the Repository, which is a collection of various documents pertaining to the independence debate we’ve accumulated over time and which we’ve now stuck in one place for easy finding, should you need to refer to them.

The White Paper is in there, of course, along with many of the other papers of non-specific colours released by both the Yes and No campaigns, various reports by government and independent bodies, some old election manifestos, the full text of the McCrone Report and all sorts of other stuff. If you’ve got anything that you think should be in there, send us a link in the comments and we’ll upload it.

As we’re a day behind due to Saturday’s technical catastrophe, and Chapters 12 and 13 of “The Claim Of Scotland” are unhelpfully titled, let’s give you a wee bonus and have a double helping of could-have-been-written-yesterday 46-year-old history.

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Whatever your political views, this is a very important year. The commentators, the politicians and the so-called experts will all be heard ad nauseam – but ultimately it’s you and me, the ‘ordinary’ people of Scotland, who will decide our nation’s future.

But however Scotland votes in September, what is even more important is that the people of this country seize this opportunity to take our democracy back. For whether we’re governed from Westminster or Holyrood is almost irrelevant unless democracy – real democracy – is reawakened.

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Gah. Why is it that any time we’re ever vaguely nice about the Daily Record in public, they immediately pull an idiotic stunt like this and make us look like chumps?

Watch and marvel, readers, as a headline disintegrates in front of your very eyes.

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It’s always a concerning state of affairs for any society when newspaper journalists appear less well-informed and less capable of intelligent analysis than their readers.

So we felt a letter published in today’s Herald deserved a wider audience.

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The only way never to be caught out, it’s said, is to always tell the truth, because then you never have to worry about remembering which lies you told to who. And since we’d be lying if we told you that we weren’t enjoying watching the No campaign’s catalogue of falsehood beginning to turn in on itself, as one lie attacks another, we won’t bother.

The UK government’s dramatic debt announcement this week may have marked the opening of the floodgates. Because, to complete this appalling car-crash of mixed metaphors, the whole rotten edifice is starting to crumble down about their ears.

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Our undercover mole in the No campaign got in touch last night to apologise for the fact that he hadn’t sent us much recently. It turned out he’d been hastily despatched to foreign lands to supervise the setting up of “Better Together Moscow”. But he managed to smuggle its first piece of work out to us inside a diplomatic bag.

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