Wings Over Scotland

It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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Click the image below to listen to the last two-and-a-half minutes of Scotland Tonight’s special referendum debate on the subject of welfare.

If you want to give yourself a hollow laugh, count the number of times Anas Sarwar says “I’m going to answer that question”, and then doesn’t answer the question.

Last night’s debate, as seen by studio pundits Bernard Ponsonby and Colin Mackay.

We can only commend STV on its generous supplies of green-room hospitality.

Anas Sarwar’s boorish embarrassment of a performance on last night’s STV debate doesn’t deserve a post of its own, frankly. As the Glasgow MP who thinks Scotland is a dictatorship oafishly shouted idiotic slogans over the top of Nicola Sturgeon non-stop for 45 minutes, all we could hear were the same old hollow canards Labour have been repeating for months on end, and which haven’t changed a bit in all that time.

So rather than expend any effort on debunking them again, here’s an encore.

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The results of some of the questions in this week’s Panelbase independence poll are so striking we just couldn’t help ourselves. Let’s have a quick delve.

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It’s been a remarkable week in opinion polling, with YouGov calling the independence referendum for No on Sunday, Panelbase calling it for Yes on Monday, and TNS-BMRB, according to Prof John Curtice, calling it for Don’t Know by Wednesday.

When you look at those results more carefully it becomes apparent that only the initial YouGov poll holds good news for the No camp, and the reason for this comes down to the psychology of change.

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Every single line a classic.

The No campaign got itself rather excited today about the third independence poll of this week, this time by TNS-BMRB, which showed a spectacular and unexpected doubling of the “Don’t Know” figures at the expense of both Yes and No.

We didn’t go into the other two in any depth (noting only the difference in media coverage of them), because as we’ve said for the last 18 months, simple Yes/No polls at this stage are fairly meaningless. But this one deserves a little scrutiny.

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Because everybody loves a good transcript, right?

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Sometimes there isn’t much happening in the world of politics, but it’d be a bit of a stretch to describe this week as one of those times. So we’re not sure in what context this article on the BBC website today counts as “news”.

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Curiously, the only place in the media we’ve been able to find even slightly detailed coverage of Gordon Brown’s speech on independence to a group of Labour MPs, MSPs and party apparatchiks in Govan this week was in Newsnet Scotland.

The press, which gave extensive coverage to the former Prime Minister’s last intervention in the debate, has barely mentioned the latest one, made again in the name of the figleaf “United With Labour” brand created to convince the party’s more gullible grassroots supporters that it’s not walking hand-in-hand with the Tories.

That may, of course, be because the media, while more or less obliged to cover UWL’s launch, is generally rather uncomfortable about it and doesn’t want to shine too much light on the group. But it may also be because Brown’s speech was such arrant, obvious nonsense that even Scotsman readers would be insulted by it.

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Calton Hill is probably our favourite place in all of Edinburgh. You can see everything from its slopes – Princes Street, Arthur’s Seat, the Forth Bridges, Leith, the Castle, the whole city. It’s also, now we come to look at it, just about the worst conceivable place in the entire capital to hold a rally, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

Wings Over Scotland will be there. Come and join us. We’ve a flag and everything.