Wings Over Scotland

One thing we noticed over the last week or so was the near-total lack of campaigning on the streets of Scotland’s cities and towns, from either side. So if you were inspired by the rally and fancy making a more active contribution, why not pop to your local printers, make a few copies of this excellent wee leaflet, and get busy?

You can get 1,000 A6 copies printed for £22 here (5,000 for £40). Hand ’em out or just leave them in strategic locations (with permission, of course). Let’s get the word out.

Right-click the image to get the full PDF version, ready for printing.

We’re genuinely baffled by Ed Miliband’s big conference showstopper announcement this week that a Labour government would freeze people’s utility bills for a year and a half. Channel 4’s Fact Check is extremely sceptical that it can be done at all. The energy companies are predictably furious and making all manner of dire threats.

But what we really don’t get is what the point of it is.

Read the rest of this entry →

I believe in representative government. I believe people should be able to vote for the person/party whose stated priorities and policies most closely reflect their own.

I believe a party that is elected on a manifesto should have a legal obligation to act in line with that manifesto. I believe that if politicians lie to the public or Parliament, they should face criminal prosecution.

I don’t believe any of those things are unreasonable. And they’re also the main reasons I’ve been convinced to vote Yes in the independence referendum.

Read the rest of this entry →

ASSESSOR: Rev. S. Campbell

DATE: 19-25 September 2013

LOCATION: Scotland, various

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s amazing what a trip away can do: refresh, educate, put a new slant on an old debate. I was in the US recently. The first thing I learned was before departure, and I pass it on as a tip: if you’re going to the US, fly from Dublin, not a UK airport. Apart from being about half the price – presumably because they have control over their airport taxes, so can adjust them to compete with Heathrow – it makes life far easier.

When I last flew to the US from a UK airport, long before 9/11, we were held in a bleak corridor without any amenities for well over an hour before being processed through immigration, where we were interrogated about the purpose of our visit, what address we were staying at, and where we were going exactly. It put me off re-visiting the States for a long time.

Flying from Dublin is a different experience.

Read the rest of this entry →

Because we keep telling you what a No vote really means:

“That is why I am talking quite passionately about getting English Labour MPs back up the road and for me, sitting down with Neil [Findlay] and Richard [Simpson] and Rhoda [Grant] and others and saying, let’s get health policies that can be consistent across England, Scotland and Wales.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing, pulling in the same direction as opposed to pulling our separate ways?

Devolution, in its early days, was about doing something different and it needs to enter a different phase where we start talking again more about a UK-wide policy because in the end, that helps everybody.”

That’s Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham talking to Holyrood Magazine this week, in comments strangely unpublicised in the rest of the Scottish media.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the recurring themes we hear from people about the independence debate (from Yes, No and Don’t Know folks alike) is a bewilderment about the alleged amount of grassroots campaigning undertaken by the No camp. “Better Together” is fond of making extravagant claims on its website about its number of volunteers, events and leaflets, yet almost nobody we speak to has ever seen any of them.

So we were interested to receive an email from a reader this week.

Read the rest of this entry →

Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.

Read the rest of this entry →

In a piece entitled “Scottish Labour leader says nationalism is a virus”, the Courier yesterday reported that Johann Lamont’s speech to the Labour conference “appeared to allude to the European 20th century fascist movement”.

And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s been a certain amount of hoo-haa within the independence camp this morning about a Telegraph piece reporting comments by Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran in which she appears to cast doubt on whether devolution has been a good thing for Scotland at all.

We’re not sure why, because they’re nothing we weren’t telling you almost a year ago.

Read the rest of this entry →

Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:

Can you supply the missing words?

Read the rest of this entry →

Arch-Unionist and BBC-favoured pundit (hey, what a freakish coincidence! What are the odds?) Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University has a blog post up today. A reader asked us to go and tackle it, but Prof. Tomkins has one of those infinitely irritating twatblogs that won’t let you post comments unless you hand over all your personal details and give permission for spambots to assail your Facebook and Twitter accounts with annoying gibberish, so we’ll have to do it here instead.

It won’t make any sense unless you read the post first. It’s here.

Read the rest of this entry →