Wings Over Scotland

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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This is hereditary Westminster Labour MP Anas Sarwar in yesterday’s Evening Times:

“Now, it’s been said by some that there is no passion in the case that we are better together as part of the United Kingdom.

Well, the people saying that obviously haven’t been at any of the rallies I have been at across Scotland, and where I spoke about an idea much bigger than independence; the pooling and sharing of resources across the UK for the benefit of everyone in the UK.”

Hang on – “rallies”? Were we watching the wrong channel when we missed the tens of thousands of people packing the streets for the Great Rally Of The Union? Were we passed out in a cupboard for the whole time when the Anas Sarwar Evangelical Roadshow filled football stadia in every corner of the land with crazed disciples waving Union Jacks and chanting “POOL AND SHARE! POOL AND SHARE!”?

Rallies? What on Earth is the truth-averse wee twerp talking about? We need a doctor.

Alert readers will already know how cranky we can get about badly-formatted comments, which waste a lot of our time and are disrespectful to other readers. In fairness, however, our shonky comments plugin didn’t help. So after much poking around we’ve switched to a new, sleeker system. It’ll be second nature to anyone with experience of HTML, but for everyone else here’s a simple pictorial guide.

(Click the image to enlarge.) There are numerous other HTML tags in existence, but the <i> and <b> ones should be plenty for most purposes – don’t go mad making everything purple and different fonts. The new preview pane below the actual comment box shows you exactly how your comment will appear before you hit Submit, so now if you post one with no paragraph breaks in it there isn’t a court in the land that would convict us for smashing your head in with a jagged rock.

That is all.

Chapter 11 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

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We’re quite keen to peruse the results of this poll, which was conducted a few days ago by YouGov alongside their World War 1 one, but hasn’t yet published.

We got in touch, but the company was unable to tell us when, or whether, the responses to this question (and some others about independence, along with some on Welsh education) would be made public. It doesn’t seem like the kind of question that would be particularly useful as a piece of private polling, so keep your eyes peeled.

…about the shameful, despicable sectarian comments by TV celebrity and occasional politician George Galloway in an Edinburgh Evening News article today, about how he’s been refused permission by West Lothian Council to put on his anti-independence “Just Say Naw” roadshow at a municipal venue in Livingston.

But then we kept reading, because we don’t like to go off half-cocked without getting the full story, and were richly rewarded for our effort by a magnificently deadpan line from the paper’s reporter. We’ve unsubtly bolded it for you below.

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John Crace, the Guardian, 14 Jan 2014:

“Is it conceivable that [Sherlock] Holmes might have been a Labour voter now? Possibly. New Labour changed the rules of political engagement. What the Daily Mail still doesn’t quite get is that voting Labour is no longer a challenge to the establishment, it’s a part of it. There is no major redistribution of wealth and power for the right to fear.”

British politics: elementary.

A must-view for those of you who missed last night’s Scotland Tonight. Watch and marvel (mainly from 2m 28s) as a man falls apart in front of your eyes, reduced to a babbling, incoherent shambles by a calm, eloquent gent in a sharp tweed suit.

Our favourite bit is the desperate, plaintive “Just ask Alistair Darling!” at the end.