Wings Over Scotland

Sorry, folks. We haven’t quite managed to get going today. We’ve got a cold, the weather’s grey and miserable, and watching the TV feels like being stuck in a bad dream you can’t wake up from, as the Tories look for new ways to be evil and Labour’s response isn’t to condemn their grotesque, neo-feudal plans for the people of Britain, but to say “Hey, you’re stealing our ideas!”

(The ever-delightful Liam Byrne, there, apparently totally unashamed to say that “this announcement is little more than reheating of a Labour scheme – ‘Work for your Benefits’ – which the Tories scrapped when they came into power”.)

Beset by this avalanche of vile, spiteful idiocy (all of which was allowed to pass unchallenged by a subservient BBC), our germ-weakened mind has reeled like a punch-drunk boxer. But we’re not yet quite so addled and bewildered that the likes of Ruth Davidson can get anything past us.

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This man only controls the finances of Scotland because Scotland is part of the UK.

Never forget that if you listen to Labour and vote No next September, there’s (at least) a 60% chance that he’ll control the finances of Scotland until 2020. Ready to risk it?

The strain of keeping up a three-year campaign of fearmongering and bile is starting to tell on the stout media defenders of the Union. This week the Telegraph’s blustering “Scottish Editor” Alan Cochrane flopped out a particularly limp effort on the subject of the scare du jour, an independent Scotland’s defence.

Never one to shy away from the sort of hyperbole you’d normally associate with some anonymous Twitter loony, Cochrane leapt straight in by dismissing the SNP’s proposals for Scottish defence as “the most ludicrous of all” of their policies, rating them 11 out of 10 for madness. But it was his attempts to put some numerical meat on the bones of this bold assertion that showed up just how lazy the Unionist narrative of Scottish inadequacy has become.

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Nice of them to lay this on today.

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As far back as I can recall, I haven’t believed in anything.

I’ve had no over-riding passion for change, I’ve felt jaded and disconnected from the establishment, from the institutions. Westminster and the political scene of the UK was framed by a “they’re all the same” mentality. All I saw was greed and corruption in people who didn’t represent my view of the world, but that’s just how it is, right? It’ll always be the same, we can’t change it.

But maybe we can.

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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.

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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.

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ASSESSOR: Rev. S. Campbell

DATE: 19-25 September 2013

LOCATION: Scotland, various

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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.

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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.

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