Wings Over Scotland

You may have noticed we’ve been a bit paralysed by choice today. Bizarre idiocy from the No camp has broken out across so many different fronts at once that we couldn’t decide which one to tackle first.

Labour’s extraordinary attempt to steal the SNP’s clothes in Dunfermline? The Mail’s hilarious editorial on the “bitter attacks” of the “demoralised” Yes campaign? Alan Cochrane’s disintegrating composure and sanity? The cluelessly deranged “Braveheart and Sassenachs” wordspew from Andrew Gilligan in this morning’s Telegraph?

On reflection, the most significant is probably the increasingly noticeable shift in the tone of coverage in the Guardian, the UK newspaper with by some distance the most extensive Scottish reporting. At the weekend we highlighted a truly horrible piece of sub-Daily-Express smearmongering by the  paper’s Scottish correspondent Severin Carrell based – on its own open admission – entirely on rumours and speculation from a couple of Labour activists.

Today, the same reporter adopted a more subtle approach.

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(with apologies to the author of The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, and with thanks to Johann Lamont for the virus)  

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As a wee treat to keep out the winter chill, we’ve got a special double dose of “And Finally” for you tonight, readers. First up, a couple of late entries for our “Unionists Say The Funniest Things” compilation this week, both of them from Labour MSP production line Michael McMahon (Uddingston and Bellshill):

(Click the image for the article in question.)

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In the 1979 general election, the Scottish Conservatives received 916,000 votes. In 1984, only a few years later, the US historian Barbara Tuchman wrote The March of Folly which explored the bizarre fact that governments sometimes act directly against their own interest, and lose the American colonies or the Vietnam war as a result.

She identifies the chief folly as ‘wooden-headedness’ – sticking blindly to a policy despite all evidence that it is failing. Since 1976, the Scottish Tories have been doing just that. Too stupid to realise that they had to act differently or suffer for it. Too poor in imagination to reach for alternatives. And rapidly becoming too wee to be relevant.

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We’ve noted a few times recently that the increasingly bitter, angry and even violent tone of the “Better Together” campaign isn’t the sort of thing you’d normally expect from a movement confident and relaxed about its chances of victory.

But over the space of just the last few days – perhaps enraged by the positivity of the SNP conference – the defenders of the Union have been descending into madness even more precipitously than usual.

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On the day of the march and rally for independence in Edinburgh last month, the BBC’s coverage was token to the point of openly contemptuous. As 20,000 people marched through the nation’s capital to hear the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and others speak in public, the state broadcaster grudgingly provided a few seconds of footage of the march on Reporting Scotland, and then bizarrely gave equal airtime to the “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall and a suspiciously staged-looking leafleting of four or five people by the No camp.

It struck us as weird at the time, and the episode of Reporting Scotland in question curiously never found its way onto the iPlayer, unlike every other one.

And then tonight it happened again.

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Experienced readers will know that it’s a rare and special day when the BBC deigns to open up a Scottish story on its website to reader comments.

The results are invariably to be cherished, as our friends elsewhere in the UK share their considered, informed and thoughtful views on why we’re all better together.

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By now most of you will probably have seen the BBC’s revelations about HS2, and how the government tried to conceal the predicted negative economic effects on areas not served by the new line. A Freedom Of Information request revealed the plan would see almost £320m a year sucked out of the Aberdeen and Dundee areas alone, with the benefit going to London (£1.5bn), Manchester (£834m) and Birmingham (£764m).

(In fairness, the document also suggested Edinburgh and Glasgow would be net winners, though we can’t for the life of us understand how. If reducing the journey time from Edinburgh to London generates more investment in Edinburgh – a dubious enough premise to start with – why does reducing the journey time from Aberdeen to London by the same amount of time have the opposite effect?)

The good news for the residents and businesses of the North-East, of course, is that Scotland’s share of the cost of HS2 is a mere £4.2bn at the latest estimates (which are of course likely to be revised dramatically upwards over time), which is only enough to double the current government investment in ScotRail for around 14 years.

Where do we sign up for this bargain?

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Next year, you can decide to always get the government you vote for.

Or you can pick one of these three. Your call.

We forget who, but someone we read this week – in the Herald, we think – referenced a line spoken by Jennifer Aniston’s character in an old episode of Friends (which we’ve managed to identify as S02E01, “The One With Ross’s New Girlfriend”):

“When I saw him get off that plane with her, I really thought I just hit rock bottom. But today, it’s like there’s rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me.”

We were put in mind of it by something in this afternoon’s Guardian.

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We haven’t had one in this series for a wee while, have we?

That’s Labour’s shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Margaret Curran, accusing the First Minister of “misleading” Scots by suggesting she wants to scrap the Barnett Formula. The only possible implication can be that she doesn’t want such a thing.

Let us help refresh your memory, Margaret.

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