Wings Over Scotland

This week, the University and College Union (UCU) have set out their manifesto for higher and further education in anticipation of the independence referendum. It denounces the funding system preferred by the big three Westminster parties and offers full backing to the Scottish Government’s policy of free tuition, while calling for immigration changes in order to support students and academics coming from abroad to study and work in Scotland.

“It is right that students who benefit from higher-than-average incomes should pay something back, but they should do so through progressive income tax,”

“Business depends on graduates and should make a contribution rather than receiving tax breaks. Higher education should be substantially paid for through general taxation.”

“Scotland does not have great concerns about an immigration influx and should relax rules which could lead to greater recruitment of students, though they may be put off by negative perceptions of the UK system.”

While the report doesn’t say so explicitly, these views put the UCU clearly on the Yes side – immigration and taxation would continue to be powers reserved  to Westminster in the event of a No vote, and the prevailing political climate in England (particularly the south) suggests a very different direction of travel.

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Spotted by an alert reader in the Nike shop in Livingston.

Nice to see people getting ready.

The sun rarely shines on the council estates of Maryhill. But on the rare occasions when it does, they emerge, dragging their Argos Value deckchairs behind them.

The high-rise flats do their best to block the light, but they find a spot in the concrete playground where the sun peeks through. They plant their chairs, flap open their Daily Records, crack open their cans and bask in the thin angle of the sunlight.

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The following stories all come from a single day’s edition of a single British newspaper – the Independent’s issue dated 16 October 2013. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

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A brand-new scare story raised its head this week, coming in from the blind side and catching the voting public unawares with the news that Westminster has decreed that independence would see Scotland struggle to sell its food and drink products abroad.

During a visit north of the border, Owen Paterson (the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), claimed that Scottish exporters gained massive advantages from the UK government’s “clout” in markets such as China and Russia. He said an independent Scotland would struggle in comparison.

“What I see time and again after the success of the Olympics last year, the Royal Wedding and the Jubilee, is that there’s a real interest in British products… There’s a real positive for great Scottish firms like Walkers and those in the Scotch whisky industry in using the British government.

The UK is the sixth biggest economy in the world and we have real clout. When we asked that our whisky is treated fairly and ask hugely important governments in very important potential markets like China and Russia to look at counterfeiting or geographical indicators, that is to the massive advantage of that industry.

How people vote in the referendum is down to them, but I would make a very strong case that there’s a clear advantage for Scottish farmers and manufacturers to stay within the UK.”

But the minister’s assertions fall apart under scrutiny.

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Alistair Darling is in full Private Frazer mode over on the “Better Together” website today with his campaign’s latest variant on the timeless “too wee, too poor, too stupid” theme. Allow us to save you some time by stripping the entire 1000-word rant down to its three core paragraphs:

“Scotland has run a net fiscal deficit in 20 of the past 21 years. This suggests that over this period North Sea Oil receipts would have been required to fund public services in Scotland rather than being invested in an oil fund.

Faced with the fact that Scotland’s oil taxes are needed to fund Scotland’s public services, John Swinney made a decision that alter the terms of the independence debate forever. He made it clear on Good Morning Scotland that he favoured borrowing money to pay into an oil fund.

Borrowing to save is such a daft idea that it leads you back to the conclusion that to set up an oil fund they would have little choice but to raise taxes or cut spending. “

Contained within those few short lines is so much misinformation that it’s going to take rather longer to pull it all apart and see what the former Chancellor is trying to conceal, so let’s get straight to it. We don’t even have time for a picture.

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Because frankly we could write 10,000 words and not say as much about the state of the United Kingdom in 2013 – and its future – as these two pictures do.

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As a NATO member state with a strategically important position in the North Atlantic yet essentially no military at all, Iceland represents an intriguing counterpoint to the arguments of the No campaign that an independent Scotland would be somehow dangerously vulnerable to attack from enemies unknown.

Earlier this year, the Icelandic Review of Politics and Administration published a paper looking at the implications of Scottish independence for Scotland, the rUK and the rest of NATO. An alert reader sent it to us a while ago and we’ve just got round to reading it all the way through. (It’s a modest 16 pages, but hey, we’re pretty busy.)

It conclusions are rather less doom-laden than those of the UK government.

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Alert readers may recall a piece yesterday in which we highlighted the strange nature of this weekend’s Sunday Post front-page lead story. It appeared to regard the Scottish Government pursuing the policies on which it had stood for election as some sort of illegitimate guilty secret, and made great play of the fact that the Scottish Government had attempted to withhold the cost of some expert advice it had sought.

There are, of course, two protagonists in the independence debate, so it would seem only fair to examine the UK government’s conduct in preparing the reports with which it seeks to counter the Scottish Government’s documents, and the transparency thereof.

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Alert readers will have noticed that the mainstream press has been rummaging through its Greatest Nat-Bashing Hits again over recent days, trying to flog one last turn around the track out of the year-old “EU advice” story. The Herald, Telegraph, Express and others have all dredged it up again to excoriate the Scottish Government for “wasting” just over £19,000 (or in newspaper arithmetic, “£20,000”) trying to uphold the principle of law officers being able to give advice in confidentiality.

But wait a minute – when this story first did the rounds, wasn’t it a lot more?

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This is the front page lead story from today’s Sunday Post:

There’s a curious line there. Can you spot it?

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We must confess, we’ve never quite understood the No campaign’s longing to turn the independence referendum into one on Alex Salmond. The First Minister certainly divides opinion, but his personal ratings are consistently more impressive (and by a considerable distance) than poll figures for Yes.

The latest one we could find (from a month ago) suggests that if the referendum question was “Do you want to entrust Scotland’s future to Alex Salmond?”, the Yes side would win by an 11% margin on an 85% turnout.

So it makes stuff like this, from today’s Sunday Herald, all the more puzzling.

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