Wings Over Scotland

The debt Scotland stands to inherit as an independent nation is often used as a stick to beat the Yes camp, and various “estimates” of the size of said debt – ranging from the merely extreme to the comically deranged – are a core element of the scare stories that suggest Scotland would have a fragile economy prone to collapsing the first time there was a bad year for oil prices/production.

But to understand the reality you need to dig a little into the nature of the debt, as the relatively widely-known figures of outstanding UK debt only tell half the story. Delving into the (deliberately) labyrinthine world of finance is a daunting task, but we’ll keep this as understandable as we can.

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We haven’t had one of these for a while, but it’s a peach. Phil Welsh is an official of the Unison trade union in Dundee, though we notice he’s recently removed that fact from his Twitter bio. We’ve had to block him now for associating with our hate-crazed psycho stalker, but earlier this week we were having a chat about the bedroom tax and Labour’s evictions policy when this happened.

See below for the rest of the conversation.

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Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.

But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.

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This site spends much of its time highlighting major outbreaks of misrepresentation, spin, distortion and outright lying in the Scottish and UK media. Readers will be aware that we very rarely find ourselves short of material.

Which means that we don’t often have time to report the small stuff.

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Whenever there’s a discussion of women’s voting intentions in the referendum, it’s striking how quickly it all slides into stereotyping. Maybe that’s inevitable when you set out to examine the collective motivations of a group of diverse individuals who basically have one characteristic in common. Sometimes it feels like asking what all red-haired or right-handed people think.

Attempting to speak for all women, then, is a bit like herding cats. So let’s not try.

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Yesterday was (variously by turns) such an exhausting, depressing and infuriating day that some drastic action was required this afternoon in order to restore our spirits.

Lucy, meet the readers of Wings Over Scotland. Readers, Lucy.

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We were struck by a curious vision when watching Thursday’s edition of Scotland Tonight. The show bizarrely chose to focus its attention on the manufactured outrage about Elliot Bulmer’s article for the Herald, with the alleged serious criminal offence which led to the “revelation” reduced to a minor incidental footnote.

And we found ourselves wondering what would have happened if the producers had gotten their scripts mixed up, and treated the other big news story of the day – the conviction of MSP Bill Walker for a string of domestic assaults on family members between 1967 and 1995 – the way it handled the Yes Scotland hacking story.

We think it might have gone a bit like this.

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We had an interesting discussion on Twitter this afternoon with the Guardian’s Severin Carrell. As a result, we decided to check something out that we hadn’t seen anyone be clear about, and the upshot is that we can now confirm, from what we’ll call “an extremely well-placed source”, that the Herald was fully aware, every step of the way, that Elliot Bulmer’s piece had been commissioned by Yes Scotland, and that it was submitted to the Herald through Yes Scotland.

It was, therefore, solely and exclusively the Herald’s responsibility to disclose, or not disclose, anything and everything to do with the article’s provenance that it considered pertinent. The Herald chose to publish the piece (having no obligation to do so). The Herald knew precisely where it came from and by what route. The Herald chose not to mention the Yes Scotland connection (which it was also under no obligation to do). Yes Scotland, and Elliot Bulmer, hid nothing from anyone.

Them’s the facts. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. That is all.

So, to the elephant in the room, then. Certain elements of the Scottish press are busting a gut today in an attempt to fabricate a scandal around a man writing some honest opinions in a newspaper for money.

Judging by the tone of the coverage, it seems they have a case, in so far as that Scottish newspapers are plainly no place for honesty.

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We try very very hard not to be crude on this website. But sometimes you’ve just got to bite the bullet and point out that someone’s a completely boneheaded moron who shouldn’t be sent out for bread and milk without grown-up supervision, let alone given a senior political position in what was once a respectable major party.

Margaret Curran wants to be Secretary of State for Scotland.

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We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.

We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.

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As we were forced to consider Labour’s “One Nation” policy again today, we couldn’t help thinking back to something that happened in London just a week ago.

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