Wings Over Scotland

Below is an extract from an article published in the US quarterly Dissent Magazine, entitled “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark”.

We tweeted a link to it yesterday but dismayingly nobody seemed to notice it (not a single retweet last time we looked), and it really deserves reading. It’s an aspect of Nordic social democracy and gender equality that you don’t hear much about.

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We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland ahead of tonight’s episode. Now that we have, we rather wish we’d heeded this advice from the PS3 iPlayer.

It’s like it knew.

This is the entrance to the municipal offices of Stirling Council (“Scotland’s Heart”), visible from the monument to William Wallace that looks over the former Scottish capital. The figures guarding the doorway are Wallace and Robert the Bruce.

The building’s flagpole is flying a Saltire (specifically the city’s own modified coat-of-arms version, which features a Lion Rampant and explicitly represents the Battle of Bannockburn), as you might quite reasonably expect it to.

Enjoy this patriotic sight while you can. It might have barely 48 hours left.

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As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.

He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.

As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).

Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?

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This, chums, is what the Daily Telegraph thinks of as “a house”:

The article appears to go on to suggest that house prices in England would rocket as a result of a Yes vote, while those in Scotland would plummet. We’re not quite sure that the average Scottish voter will reach the same conclusion from that assertion that the Telegraph would want them to.

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It’s not directly related to Scottish independence, but we were disturbed to be alerted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray to a piece of recent BBC coverage. A friend of ours has helpfully cut down the video footage in question to just the important parts, and saved it in case of sudden disappearances. You should probably watch them.

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The new Scottish Secretary, Alistair Carmichael, in Holyrood magazine in 2010:

“Getting rid of the Scotland Office is a ‘job waiting to be done’, says Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, dubbing the current Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy as a ‘tax-funded campaign manager for the Labour Party in Scotland’.

In an interview with Holyrood magazine, Carmichael said that if his party got into power there would be no Scotland Office, asserting that he would instead head up a department of the Nations and Regions.

 He continued: “I think there is a job to be done but having the Scotland Office is not the right way to do it because it should be the clearing house between government in Edinburgh and government in London but now it is just a focal point for conflict.”

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.

Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.

(Click the image for the full audio.)

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As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)

His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.

If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.

To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.

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This really happened today.

Read it for yourself by clicking the pic. (No Mail Online traffic will be generated.)

It’s the “catastrophic” that makes it special.