Wings Over Scotland

[We’ve got something special for those of you who can’t make it to the march in Edinburgh today (or are reading en route). Julie McDowall pens the Herald’s brilliant online dating blog, but there’s a lot more to her writing than that.]

There is a groove on my skull. I can run my fingertip along it.

On your first day in a call centre they present you with a headset. You might chuckle when you first wear it, pretending to be Madonna or a helicopter pilot. But the chuckles die at the end of the shift when you lift the metal band and ruffle your hair, feeling the dent on your head.

And it can hurt, so you start to unclamp the contraption between calls and hang it round your neck, but a manager is soon gesturing wildly at you with the ‘hood up’ signal. Get that metal band clamped back onto your head. You may not remove it.

After a few years, a permanent line is engraved on your skull. You are branded.

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*bites tongue*

*bites tongue again, harder*

Right. Our chosen meeting place, it turns out, is “off-map” and likely to be frowned on by police, given its immediate proximity to the “VIP area” that we didn’t know existed until 20 minutes ago. And even though it’s probably too late now for many of the people who were planning on joining our group to see this post, it’ll likely cause fractionally less chaos to post it than to not.

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We’ve been meaning to mention this curious extract from a “Please send us cash!” mailshot that “Better Together” sent out this week:

It’s the middle sentence that caught our eye. We’re reasonably sure that the Scottish Government isn’t allowed under either Electoral Commission or Scottish Parliament rules to “spend millions of pounds of public money on propaganda campaigns”.

And while we also know that there are very few rules about political organisations telling lies to voters, one of the few that DOES exist is a prohibition against falsehoods where “the specific statement in question is part of a direct solicitation for money”, which this quite clearly is.

We might just have to drop the ASA a wee line.

We just noticed this from The Observer in January 2012:

“Since Labour lost the general election in May 2010, Alistair Darling has been enjoying the relative calm of life as a backbench MP.

After David Cameron reignited the debate about independence a week ago, demanding that Scottish National party leader and Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, come clean over the timing and scope of a referendum, Darling was immediately punted as the best man to lead the “no” campaign. He is respected, he is not a Tory, and he is a fervent unionist. Perfect for the job. But he wants none of it.

“I will play my part, certainly. But I don’t want to do that. I am too busy as a Westminster MP. This campaign has to be run in Scotland.”

A man whose word can clearly be relied on, there.

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The Scotsman, 19 September 2013:

“Only one in ten voters would prefer the next General Election to result in another coalition government, a poll has found as Nick Clegg sought to convince voters it was in the country’s best interests. More than two thirds (67 per cent) would prefer to see an outright victory by one party.

Even if the election does result in another hung parliament, more than half (51 per cent) would rather see the largest party rule as a minority administration than another power-share, the ComRes poll for ITV showed.

Voters gave a resoundingly negative verdict on the Lib Dems’ contribution to the coalition, with almost twice as many (46 per cent) disagreeing that it had been “good for the country” as agreeing (24 per cent).”

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One other thing struck us about the YouGov poll for the Sun we mentioned earlier today. It recorded voter responses by both how they voted in 2010 and how they plan to vote in 2015, and the numbers were drastically different.

If  for the sake of argument we regard the Lib Dems as still being very broadly on the (relative) left of the UK political spectrum, and the emergent UKIP as obviously on the right, we get a rather chilling result.

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[Over the coming months we aim to bring you the breadth and depth of the Yes vote under our “Perspectives” tag, because there’s no such thing as a “typical” Yes supporter. Yesterday we heard from 15-year-old Saffron Dickson. Today it’s the turn of one of the many English people living in Scotland who want out of the UK too.]

I saw a poll last week that gave the Yes campaign for an independent Scotland a 1% lead. The last time I looked, the No camp had had it by a country mile. Is this phenomenal turnaround any kind of surprise? Not in the slightest.

In an era of such abject political mediocrity, Alex Salmond stands out like a giant redwood among a field of saplings. It’s hard to imagine how far behind he would have to be for the No campaign to feel truly confident of success. A few weeks before the last Scottish Elections he was 20 points adrift, but when the ballots were counted he won by a country mile.

I’m no kind of betting man, but if I was, it would be a no-brainer as to where punt my cash. Not only is Salmond the standout politician of his generation in terms of getting ballots into boxes, the lineup who are going try to take him down aren’t even close to being in the same league. All of which makes it seem more than likely that Scotland will be its own nation in a year’s time.

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve now spent a third of my life up here as a “white settler”. I’m now a well and truly established immigrant. My English roots, though, don’t deny me the chance to have a vote on Scotland’s future and, unless something changes in a big way, that vote is almost certainly going to be Yes.

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Vote No in 2014 and one of these three could be your nation’s leader:

The full data tables are here. In them you’ll learn that just 6% of Labour voters think Ed Miliband is “strong”, only 13% of Conservative voters think David Cameron is “in touch with the concerns of ordinary people”, and incredibly, as many as 13% of Liberal Democrat voters still think Nick Clegg “sticks to what he believes in”.

You could have one – or quite possibly two – of those guys, who even their own supporters overwhelmingly think are useless. Or you could have a Scot leading a government of Scots elected by Scots making all the decisions about Scotland.

It’s your choice. You’ve got a year left to think about it.

We couldn’t help but notice this new BBC referendum logo.

We like how they’re thinking.

[15-year-old Saffron Dickson’s passionate, articulate contribution to a Radio 5 debate in Glasgow this week captured the hearts of everyone in the independence movement. She’ll have a vote in the referendum a year from today, and we asked her to tell us why she’ll be using it to say Yes. These are her words.]

As a young person living in Scotland, I believe wholeheartedly that Scotland is the most beautiful and prosperous country I know of. I realised this at a very young age, I might add. The site of the ‘Better Together’ campaign never really appealed to me.

I’ve always made a point of never believing or following anything I can’t fully intellectualise, so the Yes campaign was the only way for me. Living with a strong political family, I’ve always had an interest in politics, but rest assured I’m not voting Yes based on family. I’ve debated this vigorously, and my heart and my head just want what’s best for Scotland.

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So it’s getting close to that time. How do we feel about gathering the team here?

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No campaign director Blair McDougall speaking to BBC News this morning.

Don’t you think he looks tired?