Wings Over Scotland

We don’t normally post stuff straight out of SNP press releases, but we’re about to have some sort of breakdown today on account of the appalling Windows 8, and this is some powerful polling data, so we hope you’ll forgive us a bit of a cut-and-paste job.

The Nats commissioned a poll this month from Panelbase of 1,011 people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which found overwhelming support for the rest of the UK sharing Sterling and the Common Travel Area with an independent Scotland.

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As the No camp and Scottish media cycle diligently through their three favourite scare stories (EU membership-currency-border posts, round and round and over and over), they regularly alight on the one that has the most bearing on normal people’s lives.

That is, that because the current Scottish Government proposes to undertake differing immigration policies to those of the UK after independence, Scotland would “pose an open-border threat” to the rest of the UK, and that therefore you’d need to go through border checks to visit your grandpa in Penrith.

Clearly we haven’t debunked that one in sufficient depth yet, so let’s go.

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Looks like the dastardly SNP have succeeded in digging that giant trench from the Solway to the Tweed and sailing Scotland off towards its Nordic neighbours. Poor England, according to tomorrow’s Mail, is now an island.

We have a feeling, readers, that the Scottish edition won’t be carrying that headline.

Since we’re talking about The Independent today, we thought those of you who don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook might like to see their latest editorial cartoon.

No, we’re not making that up.

The Independent is the most English newspaper in Britain. Alone among the nationals, it has neither a Scottish edition nor even a Scottish news section. And for the vast majority of the time, it acts as though Scotland simply doesn’t exist at all. (Or, perhaps, as if Scotland was already independent and therefore none of its business.)

So it’s perhaps not altogether surprising that on the rare occasions it dares venture north of Luton, it invariably makes a gigantic ham-fisted hash of it.

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We weren’t going to post today, but we couldn’t let this one just sneak past under the cover of Christmas, because the way the story has evolved this week says so much about how the pro-Union media operates and what we’re up against.

That’s the delightful Fraser Nelson, unfathomably-accented editor of right-wing commentary magazine The Spectator and the living embodiment of our own Sir Jock Finlay-Urquhart-Duncan in his youth. A couple of days ago Mr Nelson wrote the most extraordinary leader column for the magazine, and then things unfolded.

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One day is all it takes. Happy Christmas, readers.

The official Wings Christmas card.

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As a civil servant in London in the 1960s, and being part of the establishment, I always accepted the general view that an independent Scotland would not be able to survive on its own without financial help from the London Exchequer.

However, when in 1968 I was able to closely examine the UK’s “books” for myself in an official capacity, I was shocked to find that the position was exactly the opposite: that Scotland contributed far more to the UK economy than its other partners. And this, of course, was all before the oil boom.

I realised that the Treasury would wish to keep this a secret, as it might feed the then-fledgling nationalistic tendencies north of the border. I decided to keep an eye on the situation to see how long it would take for the true facts to emerge, which I felt would only be a short time. However, the machinery of Westminster, aided and abetted by the media, did an excellent job of keeping the myth about “subsidised” Scotland alive.

In fact it took another 30 years before the first chink in their armour appeared.

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Our more downmarket readers may have noticed this piece in today’s Scottish Sun:

But we were tickled to learn this morning, from a very well-placed inside source, that the advertising agency involved had also (genuinely) presented as part of their report a graphic demonstrating the current public perception of the No campaign.

You can see it below.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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