Wings Over Scotland

We’re still dutifully ploughing through “Scotland’s Future”, but in truth we’re not really its target audience. We’re already convinced, and much of it is just like reading our own articles back except in rather blander language. What we can definitely say for certain is that it doesn’t lack detail – the composition of an independent Scotland’s armed forces, for example, is laid out almost down to the rifle.

Naturally, that didn’t stop the No camp from rushing onto the nation’s TV screens within minutes of the press launch ending with their considered, serious and thoughtful assessments of a document none of them had read.

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Alert readers may have noticed that the Scottish Government website and the scotreferendum.com one are both somewhat besieged by traffic at the moment and struggling to load. So we’ve uploaded local copies of both the full White Paper and the summary document, in “epub” format (for tablet devices and smartphones) and PDF for reading on PCs. You can find them below.

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There’s an atrocious piece of journalism in this morning’s Guardian, and on this particular occasion we’re referring to its technical standards rather than any bias or spin. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“The Treasury has claimed Scotland’s voters will face tax rises of £1,000 per head after independence unless the next Scottish government immediately cuts billions of pounds in spending.

In a calculated effort to undermine the release on Tuesday of the landmark white paper outlining the case for Scottish independence, the Treasury said those increases would hit 2.4m people now paying the basic rate of income tax.

It said the alternative, according to the most optimistic scenario for Scotland’s economy and debt levels sketched out last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, would be to cut public spending by £3bn more than the UK government plans by 2021.”

We’re confused already.

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So today we got a response from the BBC to our Freedom Of Information request concerning this story. Those of you who’ve ever sent an FOI request to the state broadcaster before probably won’t need to read any further.

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We’re indebted to an extra-specially-alert reader who keeps an eye on the Spanish press for us. Last week, leading newspaper El Pais carried a story which reported an interview given by Alistair Carmichael to various foreign media. The first paragraph contains a quote which Google Translate renders thus:

“If Scotland becomes a foreign country, we will treat [it] as a foreign country.”

A fascinating use of “we” there from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth, we’re sure you’ll agree. (Though we’re not sure who “we” would be in that scenario, as if Scotland was independent there’d be no Scottish Secretary and no Scottish MPs, so we can’t quite fathom what Mr Carmichael’s locus would be in the matter.)

We’d be prepared to chalk it down to the vagaries of automated translation, were it not for the fact that the minister said basically the same thing twice more this weekend, first referring to Scotland as “they” on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning, and then repeatedly as “her” on The Sunday Politics.

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There’s an interesting piece from Lesley Riddoch in this morning’s Scotsman, pointing out that “Better Together” is scared to put its prospectus for a Scotland inside the UK to the electorate, preferring a purely destructive critical approach to the Yes side’s:

“If this was an important individual decision like the choice between two homes or two cars, you can bet your bottom dollar the pros and cons of each option would be minutely listed, questioned and compared by prudent consumers.

And yet as citizens we are content to make a decision on the future of Scotland based on scrutinising the apparent shortcomings of the independence option only.”

But while the piece echoes one we wrote last weekend pointing out that Scots will be choosing between two different futures next September (not just opting to keep things as they are) Riddoch doesn’t quite capture the full extent of the No camp’s cowardice, because she misses one important point.

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(Story.)

We apologise both for the slightly uncouth language in that headline and the mangling of an infamous phrase from the 1995 OJ Simpson murder trial.

But it’s hard to reasonably appraise the conduct of Scotland’s two supposed “quality” newspapers this weekend with regard to the Yes Scotland email hacking incident without using expletives, and that’s just about the mildest level of comment we could muster about the naked lies both have told the Scottish public.

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Hi, my name is Cindie, I’m one of those “New Scots” you hear people talking about from time to time, and I’m going to vote Yes in 2014.

Born in Wales with an English father and Irish grandfather, I’m probably the epitome of “Britishness”. I moved to Scotland from London in the late 1980s after almost ten years of Conservative government – ten years which had already changed the country that I grew up in beyond all recognition.

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Herald View in the Sunday Herald, 24 November 2013:

“The geriatric forecasts of the IFS are surely a vision of Scotland if it stays in the UK. Without a new immigration policy and economic policies that keep skilled Scots families in Scotland, how can we avoid an ageing population?

Carwyn Jones has also joined the clamour for the Barnett Formula on Scottish public spending to be cut. The message is clear: within the union Scotland faces a future of public spending constraints, falling population and economic decline. Scottish representation in Westminster will likely be cut under the McKay Commission into the consequences of devolution.

The Scottish Parliament will have to pay its way by raising taxes in Scotland, without having access to oil revenues or the ability to legislate for growth. Scotland may be dragged out of Europe if it remains in the UK.

This is the off-the-peg future offered by the unionists. They’d better have a care: Scots might actually start listening to what they say.”

It’s nice to know that – finally – we’re not the only ones paying attention.

So we’re pretty embarrassed that we’ve only just put these two things together. We’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently pointing out that there’s almost no chance of the Barnett Formula – in essence, a mechanism for returning to Scotland some of the excess money it sends to Westminster in the form of oil revenue and tax receipts – being retained after the next UK general election.

We’ve also spent a good six months highlighting that the possibility of Holyrood being given “more tax powers” after a No vote is actually a trap, not in reality offering more power at all, but more responsibility. (Because it does you no good to have to collect your own tax revenue – the power lies in deciding how your tax revenue is spent.)

And duh, it’s taken us till now to see the connection. Boy, is our face red.

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You may have read today that “Better Together” is planning a major “newspaper-style” leaflet drive for the release of the White Paper next week. Thanks to our ever-alert spies in the No camp, we’ve managed to secure a leaked copy of the text. You can read it below.

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