Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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”.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

(Now to questions typed by someone with a rudimentary command of written English.)

Because as we know “Better Together” will have quite a lot of trouble coming up with any coherent replies, we’ve had a bash ourselves while we wait for them to get started.

Read the rest of this entry →

“Herald View”, the Sunday Herald, 12 Jan 2014:

“The Deputy First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is to be commended for refusing to participate in the victimisation of the ‘undeserving poor’. She promises to scrap the bedroom tax, keep housing benefits and reject the forthcoming Universal Credit, which amalgamates a whole range of benefits into one payment. The Nationalists say they will increase social security benefits and the minimum wage annually by the rate of inflation.

However, they cannot secure these protections under the current constitutional arrangements.”

Read the rest of this entry →

Chapter 10 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

Read the rest of this entry →