Wings Over Scotland

A reader recently sent us an article from Humanitie, the magazine of the Humanist Society of Scotland, in which (apparently after much delay in finding anyone willing to put the No camp’s case) a “Better Together” activist made the case for the Union, in response to a Yes piece in the preceding issue. You can read it by clicking the image.

We’ve carefully redacted the person’s identity, because we don’t want to make this personal. But reading through the litany of tired old falsehoods, we were overcome not with anger or even contempt, but with sorrow.

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We’d never heard of this until a reader mentioned it this morning in the comments, and it seems worth bringing to wider attention. The article we’re about to (re)print below is a transcript originally created by the now-defunct www.alba.org, along with a couple of extracts from the Scottish press of the time.

The original version is still visible on www.archive.org, but we’ve tidied it up a bit and added a few notes and comments of our own in red.

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You can call us crazy ideological extremists if you like. But after the Scottish press continued to obsess utterly ridiculously at the weekend over whether some Yes supporters might be working together on the Yes campaign with some other Yes supporters, we’re at least not going to be short of company in that regard.

So rather than engage in a farcical witch-hunt about whether members of Labour For Independence had ever once been photographed buying (wee) sausage rolls from THE EXACT SAME BRANCH OF GREGGS THAT SOMEONE IN THE SNP REGULARLY USES, we had the mad thought that we might, y’know, ask some of its members some questions about Labour and independence and stuff.

We’ll never get anywhere in the Scottish media with that sort of approach.

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You might find this an interesting read.

(No, we have no idea why his face is so shiny.)

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After a reader revealed that the lonely lady staffing the “Better Together” stall in Dundee yesterday was from the north-east of England, we did a little digging and discovered that she’s so dedicated to the No cause she’s been touring the whole of the UK (and even some farther-flung places) espousing the positive case for the Union.

It took some Euan McColm-esque sleuthing to track down all the evidence, but Wings Over Scotland stops at nothing to bring its readers the news that really matters.

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One of the benefits, if that’s the right word, of the Daily Record’s shambolic new iPad app is that the 30-day trial period means we got to see a print copy of the Sunday Mail today for the first time in years. It was largely like a parochial edition of Heat magazine (“FAT LASS DATES THIN BLOKE” got a spread), but buried 40-odd pages in was a “special report” that doesn’t seem to have made it onto the paper’s website.

The Mail accompanies the report with an editorial entitled “We must not abandon our Geordie pals”, which is very carefully worded in order to give the impression that a Yes vote would be to do just that, without actually saying so. But the actual content of the report is curiously at odds with the headlines.

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The “Better Together” stall at Baxter Park, Dundee earlier today.

Aw. If we’d been there we might even have gone and helped. We’re not made of stone.

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Last year’s argument over the referendum franchise saw the Scottish Government’s view win the day – that the matter should be decided according to a civic definition of nationality, rather than along the ethnic lines proposed by some in the No camp.

But what of the people of non-Scottish ethnic origin who’ve been thus enfranchised and entrusted with the future of the nation they’ve chosen to make their home?

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It’s been an interesting week for the Scottish media. First the Sun’s website vanished behind the clouds of a paywall, and today the Daily Record unveiled a new version of its tablet app which no longer gives readers the weekday paper for free.

(Both papers, naturally, presented these new restrictions as enhancements.)

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So, slightly to our surprise, we actually just got a reply from Blair McDougall to our email offering to put on a debate between Alistair Darling and Dennis Canavan at a mutually-convenient time and location and with a neutral host.

You can read it below.

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Obviously we tried ringing “Better Together” ourselves again this morning, just before 10am, but once again Blair McDougall was unavailable, and the person we spoke to couldn’t tell us when would be a good time to catch him as he’d be “in and out” of the office throughout the day.

We took that to mean that he was currently out, so we called him on his mobile.

(We’ve blanked the bit where he gives out another “Better Together” mobile number, as we don’t know if that one was publicly accessible like Mr McDougall’s was.)

We’ve sent an email to the specified address. We’ll try a text after that.

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