Wings Over Scotland

In the light of this week’s dire warnings in the media that a Yes vote would mean supermarket prices becoming more expensive in Scotland than the rest of the UK (and the near-total absence of reporting of all the supermarket chains’ subsequent denials), we were intrigued when an alert reader sent us this link to a price-comparison site.

Maybe our cheese and beer’s just much nicer or something.

Now and again, the independence debate gets so dismally stupid that we despair for a few hours and just sit around with our head in our hands trying to understand how professional, apparently-rational people can be so hopelessly, galactically thick.

Today the trigger was The Times, which issued the latest in a flurry of “post-White Paper” polls that have appeared with indecent haste and proclaimed the document’s failure, this time under the ridiculous headline “Poll sinks hope for a ‘yes’ vote”.

Do we even need to write the next bit? Does it really have to be spelled out?

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We know we’ve been talking recently about how the No campaign’s been getting nastier, but it looks like they’re about to ramp things up another notch.

Yikes!

Julie McDowall’s splendid piece for this site on call centres yesterday is causing something of a stir in the medical community today – social media is alive with shocked and disgusted doctors horrified or disbelieving at the news that their trade union, the British Medical Association, outsources its legal-advice helpline to a Serco call-centre and misleads members about its nature.

For those questioning the veracity of the claims, some references follow.

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Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?

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Imagine working for a trade union; one which is formidable and respected, one forever being sought by Radio 4. An indomitable body of professionals who never resort to strikes and scuffles, braziers and megaphones, because they’re so heavy with influence and history that they need only tap the right minister on the shoulder to have their voice heard and heeded.

Imagine working for the magnificent British Medical Association.

When I saw the BMA were recruiting in Glasgow a few years ago I was delighted and surprised. My surprise increased when I was sent to a call centre for the interview. Sitting prim and nervous in the reception area, a tacky room with walls that trembled if you brushed against them, I wondered what this cheap and nasty office could possibly have to do with the great and august BMA.

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As you can probably imagine, with over 140,000 readers a month we get quite a lot of emails. Unfortunately the contact form plugin we’ve used until now to avoid being swamped in spam (which is what tends to happen if you just give out your direct email address) is a bit rubbish, and results in an inbox that looks like this:

Having 95% of your email listed as being from “Contact” or “Contact form” is, we can reveal, a major pain in the backside when it comes to keeping track of conversations.

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Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

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Actually, we hear this one was meant for internal use only.

We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:

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Oh dear lord. The No campaign really does seem hell-bent on making life hard for those of us who occasionally enjoy mocking it by (slightly) exaggerating the depths of its “Project Fear” scaremongering strategy. They’ve attempted to terrify Scots with uncertainty over the price of stamps, mobile-phone roaming charges and having to buy in Strictly Come Dancing, but none of it’s worked.

So now they’re pulling out the big guns: baked beans.

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Amount of money saved by Iain Duncan Smith’s “benefit cap” so far:

“Around £6 million”

Amount of money wasted on Universal Credit welfare reform so far:

£120 million (or £140m, or £200m, or £425m)

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The UK government – saving you money on welfare by 2034! (If you’re lucky.)