Wings Over Scotland

We couldn’t be bothered staying up for the Dunfermline by-election result. Roughly 60 seconds into the coverage we switched over to Family Guy on BBC3, and then – faced with the unwelcome prospect of all the same old faces spouting all the same old guff as they filled dead air with deathly waffle for a few hours – we went to bed.

Since the disgraced Bill Walker’s resignation (if you can call it that, so unwillingly was he dragged out by the ankles), it’s been obvious that Labour would win, and you don’t stay up into the wee small hours watching a TV show you already know the end of.

So with the benefit of a new day’s eye, let’s have a wee delve.

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With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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Latvia has been ruled by others for most of the past thousand years, with Riga even being the largest city in Sweden until they carelessly lost it to Peter the Great in 1710. Independence from Russia came in 1918 and then from the Soviet Union in 1991.

I arrived in Riga a few months later and stayed for a year and a half. At the time I joked that, apart from my paid work, I was there to observe what they were going through and to take notes for when Scotland became independent. It’s been a long time but some things, I hope, will be relevant to the process over the next year.

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The Spectator: as subtle as it is classy.

We’ve been digging around behind the scenes for the last few days now trying to make sense of the labyrinthine tangle of claim and counter-claim over what’s going on at the Ineos refinery and petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth. The press is full of competing assertions from the various parties involved, so we’re just going to tell you what we know for sure and see where it ends up.

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Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk, 23 October 2013:

“The announcement by Ineos this morning that Grangemouth’s petrochemical plant is to close is terrible news. Hundreds of jobs lost directly, many more indirectly. The loss of a significant element of Scotland’s industrial capacity. Why has this happened?

Ineos has been flagging likely cuts for months but instead of engaging with the situation and organising a coherent plan to save jobs, Unite called a strike over a pathetic and petty issue related to Labour Party internal politics. By the time the union woke up to the reality workers faced, it was too late.”

Sounds about right to us. Mind how you vote tomorrow, Dunfermline folk.

The coalition government’s horrific new immigration bill passed its first hurdle in the House Of Commons last night by 303 votes to 18.

The administration that brought us vans touring cities telling foreigners to leave or be arrested, gangs of armed officers sweeping tube stations for any dark-skinned undesirables, British citizens being harassed by text message and incomers to Scotland met with UK Border Agency posters urging them to go home intends to make life even more wretched and intolerable for vulnerable refugees and people who want to come here and contribute to our economy and culture.

And Labour? Labour bravely abstained from the vote.

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Our big story today could almost have been designed as the perfect test of the Scottish media’s professional integrity. The revelation that “Better Together” appears to have broken the law – again – by conducting an unlicensed lottery to raise funds isn’t all that dramatic in itself, though it would demonstrate an attitude entirely in keeping with the sneering, arrogant tone adopted by the No campaign in general.

The sum involved, though – £100, in the form of five copies of a £20 book offered in return for donations – does allow us to make a rather convenient comparison.

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We had a fascinating discussion on Twitter yesterday on the subject of lotteries. It was sparked by the latest cunning money-raising scheme by “Better Together”, in which they enlisted unsuccessful “Great British Bake-Off” contestant James Morton to solicit donations, with the lure of a free signed copy of his book (cover price £20) for five lucky draw winners who’d donated more than £10.

The only slight problem with the plan is that it’s against the law.

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We got slightly distracted yesterday by documenting some eye-popping Unionist madness, and completely forgot to finish our investigation into the Guardian’s odd claims that the Scottish Government had “delayed”, “softened” and “compromised” its stance on the removal of Trident from Scotland after independence, and that such a move betrayed nervousness over the feasibility of its goal of NATO membership.

We examined one piece by Severin Carrell, but the paper actually ran two by the same author on the same subject, and the second was just as inaccurate and misleading.

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And this one might just take the entire cake stand and banana hanger.

It’s former Tory MP and junior minister Edwina Currie, speaking about someone called “Alex Salmon” on Radio 5’s Stephen Nolan show on Saturday. (From 2h 16m on that iPlayer link.) We do recommend listening to all six-and-a-half minutes. It sets a very high standard from the off, but somehow maintains it the whole way through. Enjoy.

So, we suppose we have to point out the obvious.

The conduct and result of a Holyrood by-election isn’t strictly within this site’s remit, but the astonishing audacity with which Labour are prepared to flat-out lie to the Scottish public is, because it reflects on everything they say about independence.

So let’s step through the breathtaking piece of literature above.

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