Wings Over Scotland

We’re now in the sixth day of our attempt to arrange a public debate between the respective chairmen of the Yes and No campaigns, Dennis Canavan and Alistair Darling. Yes Scotland director Blair Jenkins accepted on behalf of Mr Canavan some days ago, but despite his “Better Together” counterpart Blair McDougall initially agreeing (on the misunderstanding that we were inviting him rather than Mr Darling), he’s yet to respond to several further enquiries.

We rang the BT offices in Glasgow just after two o’clock this afternoon, but Mr McDougall was “in meetings” (though he was posting tweets two minutes beforehand) and the person we spoke to couldn’t tell us when we might be able to get hold of him. We left a message asking him to get in touch when he had a minute. We’ll let you know when we hear anything.

It’s very rare, viewers, that we get so angry in the course of writing a post that we have to stop.

But when we ran a picture last night of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP, opening a foodbank with a cretinous smile on his face as if being a member of the government of a modern industrial nation in need of foodbanks was something to be happy about, a reader suggested making a gallery of similar images.

This is as many as we could bear.

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The internet’s been enjoying itself since last night knocking up satirical versions of The Sun’s wraparound cover today. For no immediately apparent reason (except perhaps that it’s a slow time for news) the paper has suddenly decided to give a “State Of The Union”-type address explicitly setting out its beliefs on a variety of subjects.

We thought that it might pass a few idle moments to compare the UK and Scottish editions, and see how closely those beliefs matched up on either side of the border.

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(Link and link.)

Some people in Britain can’t afford to eat and are having to go to foodbanks to survive.

So open your heart (and wallet) for this hungry little ginger fella. There’s only so far an expense account will stretch when you’re on a tightly-controlled public sector salary.

(Link and link and link.)

You’ve bravely waded through a 3500-word book review already this morning, so let’s give you something a little more bite-sized to digest.

This one could be a game-changer, folks. Brace yourselves.

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Wings Over Scotland went to London last weekend, for no particular reason other than a change of scenery. After a trip to the faux-bohemian Camden Market – in which about six different stalls are now repeated over and over in a sad, gentrified mockery of its previous more anarchic life, yet while still maintaining much of the vibrant feel – we set off in no particular direction and found ourselves in Trafalgar Square.

Despite having been to the capital dozens of times, I’d never visited the home of Nelson’s Column, which is far bigger in real life than it looks in pictures, managing to dominate what is a very large plaza with no shortage of other imposing monuments and decorations. (Including the vast National Gallery and, at the moment, an incongruous enormous bright blue cockerel.)

Suitably inspired, we elected to take a stroll to the Embankment, past the London Eye, and from there on a walking tour of the heart of the British establishment. Searching for exploitable weaknesses, obviously.

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For those of you with Spotify, click the image to open.

(Full 30-track playlist here. It’s an open collaborative one so feel free to add your own suggestions, or to make a YouTube version for those without the app.)

The latest development in our prospective debate:

Bit snippy, but we’ll take it.

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From a heavily-spun Huffington Post piece on Scotland’s relationship with the monarchy, in which Dennis Canavan expressing a personal opinion when asked a question becomes an “outburst”. You know the sort of thing. (The story was also reported in the Telegraph as “Yes camp in disarray”, before a hasty rewrite.)

It’s an interesting definition of “overwhelming majority”, we’ll grant you. But it might explain why the No campaign apparently thinks it has the referendum won already.

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