Wings Over Scotland

If you’re one of our non-Luddite readers and possess a Twitter account, you’ll probably  have noticed a flurry of comment a couple of weeks back about a debate at Abertay University in Dundee (the UK’s centre of educational excellence for the videogames industry, among other things), in which the SNP’s Stewart Hosie – debating Labour’s Lord Robertson – turned round a large pre-debate majority of 59% to 21% for the Union and converted it into a clear majority of 51-38 for Yes. (A stunning 25% swing.)

Splendidly, the whole thing is now available on video. Enjoy and learn.

Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.

This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.

What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?

THOSE really big banks?

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Sometime this month, Wings Over Scotland is likely to pass 100,000 approved comments (over and above the tens of thousands that get caught by our built-in anti-spam filter, the splendid and ever-vigilant Akismet). Which is amazingly great, because the site’s comments match quantity with quality, but it’s also an awfully large volume to have to keep an eye on.

Don’t panic – we’re not about to start pre-moderating them or anything. We’re extremely proud of our (almost unique in Scottish politics) uncensored debate. But in order to stop comment-wrangling from taking up an increasingly disproportionate amount of our time and let us focus on writing articles, we’ve instituted a few official guidelines (and one absolutely cast-iron rule). We’ve added them to the “About” page.

There’s an interesting piece in today’s Scotsman, entitled “Why isn’t Scotland making more popular films?” and bemoaning the poor condition of the Scottish film industry.

At the end it contains the following paragraphs.

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My journey to Yes is probably a rather unconventional one. I’m from an establishment background: military family, English public school, Oxford. I’ve spent a lot of my life abroad and in England. My ancestors came from Hungary in the train of Saint Margaret of Scotland, who fled here from the Norman invasion and married Malcolm Canmore to become Queen Consort, way back.

When they weren’t involved in Scotland, my family were mercenary soldiers all over Europe, as were so many others. I tracked down a pair of boots in the Schottenstift in Vienna which one of my forebears left in exchange for masses to be said for his soul.

Another was granted lands and a castle in what is now Moravia, and when I visited, before the Iron Curtain was raised, there was a notice saying that he had oppressed the peasants mightily. Maybe that was just Communist propaganda. Maybe not.

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If we’ve been a bit quiet this morning, it’s because we’re wading through 120-odd pages of this, the Scottish Government’s extensive paper on “Pensions in an independent Scotland”. We’d have reprinted the Executive Summary for you, but it’s a PDF, which means we’d have to spend approximately 400 years re-formatting it to be readable. [EDIT: HTML version here.]

In the meantime we’ve attached Annex A, a list of the key proposals.

Anyway, we recommend having a read for yourself, if you can spare the time. If not, we’ll give you our impressions when we get to the end. So far it seems pretty sensible.

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We’re not quite sure why the UK government has chosen this year, of all years, to start disaggregating tax receipts by nation, breaking down the UK’s income according to how much of it came from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even calculating oil revenues on a geographical basis.

You might well imagine that such an exercise could only serve to provide fuel for the independence movement, and the initial release of figures (probably the only one before the referendum) certainly seem to confirm that impression.

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This was ex-Scotland rugby star Gavin Hastings in June:

“Former Scotland captain Gavin Hastings says it ‘beggars belief’ some Scots believe they would be better off being separate from the UK.

Speaking to The Scots Magazine he went on to warn about the dangers of complacency in the forthcoming referendum, as polls indicate the ‘No’ vote is currently ahead.

‘The danger comes with people being complacent that independence will never succeed… and people not voting or taking it for granted that we will remain part of the United Kingdom.

If we were independent would we not be doing everything in our power to find the benefits of joining up with England, Wales and Northern Ireland? Why, if we have that, would we be looking to divide it?'”

Heavens. Possibly the only man ever to sound angrier than Alistair Darling at the idea of the Scots having the sheer temerity to want to run their own affairs.

So who’s this daring have-a-go optimist in today’s Herald, then?

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When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.

When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.

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Part 1: Scottish Labour – yes, Scottish Labour – have a go at another party for (get this) an insufficiently prominent leader. No, we’re not making that up. The party led by Johann Lamont just slagged someone off for not being seen in public enough. It’s possibly the first time they’ve ever accused Alex Salmond of underpromoting himself.

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We must admit, we’re baffled by the Daily Mail’s sudden and extraordinary attack on Ralph Miliband, the long-dead father of Ed and David. If there’s any publication on Earth you’d think WOULDN’T feel on very solid ground lecturing other people on stuff they said in the 1930s and 1940s, you might imagine the Daily Mail would be it.

We can’t for the life of us work out what the right-wing hatezine thinks it could possibly have to gain from such a hysterical, vile assault, which even most Conservatives are disassociating themselves from in embarrassment.

The current Labour leader has often spoken of his rejection of his father’s strong left-wing views (indeed, he does so in the rebuttal the Mail has, albeit with the greatest of ill-grace, published today), so goodness knows what the paper is trying to achieve.

Other than, perhaps, to tempt Labour into displays of gross hypocrisy.

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