Wings Over Scotland

To be honest it barely seems worth marking the ninth anniversary of the indyref. The day our nation – albeit narrowly – bottled out of becoming a real one again is nothing to be celebrated. The supposed party of independence has run away from the fight, concerned only with feathering its own nest, and its era of power looks to be drawing to a bitter and deserved close.

But there remains one grave and glaring grievance.

And no matter what anyone says, it’ll dog democracy and condemn Scottish politics to eternal stagnation until it’s addressed.

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The key word here is “DEMAND”.

Because we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?

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Huh.

But hey, maybe it’s just one of those things where you only get a drop-down menu and there’s no option for “Scottish”, yeah?

Oh. Well, there you go then.

I’ve known my mate Chris since I was five years old and we lived next door to each other in a council scheme in Bathgate. He’s a grand lad, the sort of Rangers fan that you can introduce in polite company, a hardworking, small-c-conservative successful business owner who’d go out of his way to help you and has a few SNP councillors in his social circle.

He isn’t the least bit political. In 2014 he was a soft No whose vote was narrowly tipped by the fact that his company did almost all of its business with English clients and he feared losing them to red tape (and, ironically, English nationalist sentiment) after indy, but after the Brexit referendum he was leaning very much more Yes.

The SNP’s staggeringly incompetent rule since then blew that chance and has pushed him further back into the No camp than he ever had been before, but last night he texted me “can’t believe this actually went to print and came through our door today”.

I can’t say I blame him.

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There’s an interesting new blog today called “Will support for Scottish independence go away?”, based on some analysis of long-term polling and demographic trends. If you don’t have time to read all of it, its conclusion is, well, non-conclusive. But the problem with it is that it’s asking the wrong question.

Wings has very little doubt that polling support for Scottish independence will continue to fluctuate within a few points either way of 50% for the forseeable future, as it has done for the last decade. But the real question is whether that will matter.

Because there are other issues with very similar numbers.

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I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.

They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.

There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:

(Warning: some adult content.)

Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.

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Well, there it is.

It’s not like it hasn’t been coming.

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These are strange and grim times for the Scottish independence movement, but we never thought it’d ever get so strange that we’d be quoting Effie Deans.

Since pretty much day one, Wings has said that the only honest and honourable way to campaign against independence would be for Unionists to say Scotland isn’t a country, but a mere region of the UK. But they lack the courage to admit what their true beliefs are, and so they fall back on fear and lies disguised as concern, all cloaked in “proud Scot” protestations.

While that might be a miserable way to conduct yourself, it’s understandable, because the moment that you acknowledge Scotland as being a country, all the debating lines against independence crumble to ashes. They’re powerless in the face of the principle that countries should choose their own governments, for good or ill, because that’s what democracy is, and few people are willing to stand openly against democracy.

And what Effie Deans’ concession of this site’s cornerstone argument reveals is that Unionists finally feel safe against any threat of independence in the foreseeable future, and with good reason.

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So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.

It’s smaller than we imagined.

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In the end, it only took 12 hours.

Bless his painfully-predictable cotton socks.

But hey, bold use of “leading”.