Wings Over Scotland

Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran is quoted in the Herald today presenting the award of £300m of contracts for the navy’s innovative new aircraft-free aircraft carriers as a benefit of the Union, and continuing the well-worn scare story that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards would close in an independent Scotland.

We’ve already dealt with that particular canard, so instead let’s look at the sums.

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Even moderately alert readers will recall our expressing slight concern on Saturday at the recent disappearance of a page from the Scottish TUC website, in which the trade-union organisation outlined its view that the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system would result in a net loss of thousands of jobs in Scotland – a position which is strongly at odds with that of the Labour Party.

So we were relieved to be contacted on Sunday evening by the STUC’s Deputy General Secretary, Dave Moxham, who confirmed that the Congress’s opinion hadn’t changed, and that its full analysis could still be found here.

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We’ve been in a bit of a stat-wading frame of mind generally today, readers, so we hope you’ll forgive us for one last toot on the trumpet after a fortnight that’s seen every readership record on the site trashed in spectacular style.

It’s not even our fault – an alert reader on Twitter pointed out our soaring rating on global web traffic tracker Alexa.com over the course of the last few months (since we became wingsoverscotland.com), so we couldn’t resist a bit of a nosy poke around for the rankings of other Scottish politics sites and, well, these were the findings.

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Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:

“Prof Jim Gallagher understands the intricacies of picking and choosing powers to be devolved. He was secretary of the Calman Commission, whose recommendation formed the basis of the Scotland Act, and has co-authored a book about what will happen after the referendum.

According to Prof Gallagher, the idea of Scotland winning some version of ‘devo max’ in the aftermath of a no vote is fantastical. The term as understood by most people is ‘just independence light’ and will never be accepted by Westminster.”

Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.

We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.

And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.

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As we’ve already noted today, Wings Over Scotland has the internet’s most excellent readers. Two of them have been working together over the last week or so, after we put them in touch, to share some fascinating Scottish history with the rest of us.

Click the two images in this post for an intriguing hour-and-three-quarters.

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While the Scottish print media continues to almost totally blank our Panelbase opinion poll, it’s nice to know that they’re nevertheless paying close attention to its findings.

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On the subject of Trident, which we more or less were, here’s an interesting thing.

It’s a page from the Scottish TUC website. Or at least, it used to be.

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We’ve already noted part of Willie Rennie’s appearance on Newnight Scotland this week, reinforcing the strange phenomenon by which the Unionist parties continue to suggest that an independent Scotland would be a dictatorial state more reminiscent of Zimbabwe than a modern western democracy with a proportionally-elected parliament.

But the full transcript of the segment (provided by our excellent and much-valued new transcribing department) adds a little meat to the bones. It’s fascinating stuff.

(NB YOUR PARAMETERS OF “FASCINATING” MAY VARY.)

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Below is the headline of a story from this morning’s Independent.

We’ve read the article in question several times now looking for the supposed “bad news” for the Scottish First Minister, and we’re having no luck at all. Perhaps you can help us out with it, readers.

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If you weren’t up at 8.45am or so (it’s the weekend), click the image below to hear the interview on Good Morning Scotland on the subject of our Panelbase opinion poll.

The poll was also discussed (again) by prominent psephologist Professor John Curtice, who made a few helpful comments by way of expert advice. We’re new to the polling game, so let’s quickly address them.

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We might have to transcribe the whole thing, because it’s remarkable.

But for now here’s just a brief flavour of Willie Rennie on the subject of an independent Scotland’s membership of NATO, from last night’s Newsnight Scotland (from 5m 30s).

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