Wings Over Scotland

Seasoned readers will recall that on occasion we’ve pondered the mystery that is the membership of the itself-enigmatic entity sometimes called “Scottish Labour”.

Establishing how many members the party actually has is a puzzle that has eluded the best and brightest in Scottish journalism for years, but thanks to a tip from an alert commenter Wings Over Scotland may be able to make the breakthrough today.

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The longer this site goes on, the more we realise we could really do with some sort of proper indexing system, rather than relying on our bullet-riddled memory to be able to recall the details of something we wrote a year ago.

So in the week that the “Better Together” campaign celebrated its first birthday, and we learned that it refers to itself internally as “Project Fear”, we thought we’d collect a few of our favourite impressions of it from its own supporters (and the odd neutral) in one place where they might be easier to find.

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I’m going to do something I only do rarely and write this post in the personal pronoun, because it’s very much a personal view rather than an attempt to speak for a wider section of the independence movement. But although it’s been forming for a while, it was finally triggered by an Ian Bell comment piece in the Herald today.

You should read it all, but the key paragraph is this one:

“You have to pause, then, and ask yourself why policies that have failed for three long years cause barely a whisper of argument in Westminster. The only sensible inference, surely, is that what looks like failure to some is a very satisfactory state of affairs to others.”

That simple, understated last sentence cuts to the very heart of why Scots will stand at the edge of a terrible abyss in September 2014, with a herd of buffalo stampeding towards them, and seriously consider NOT grasping at the rope ladder dangling from the last helicopter offering to carry them safely away from the cliff edge.

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Hang on – didn’t our “Project Fear” pals spend half of last year sobbing and wailing and raging that a certain tri-morpheme prefix was leading and unfair and beastly and a clear attempt at rigging the referendum by the dastardly, unprincipled Nats?

Maybe our memory’s playing tricks on us. We’re pretty old.

Stephen Noon in the Scotsman, 25 June 2013:

“The No campaign thinks its biggest strength is fear. However, its biggest weakness is an equally powerful emotion: regret.

Just think how we will feel if there is a No vote; if in 2015 we get another government we didn’t vote for; if in 2016 we’re taken out of the European Union against our own expressed wishes; if in 2017 there are new welfare changes that introduce a lower rate of payment for people in Scotland; or if in 2018 we are still wasting £250 million a year on nuclear weapons.

We’ll regret the lost opportunity that was a Yes in 2014, with an intensity that will be brought to mind again and again. The pain of what could have been will go on.”

Oddly, despite much trailing of it before publication, we haven’t seen any major coverage of Alex Salmond’s lengthy interview with the New Statesman last week in the media. We kept forgetting to go to the shop for a copy, but today we downloaded the magazine’s iPad app, which contains the full interview among its free content.

That being the case, we’re comfortable with reprinting it for the purposes of discussion. We’ve tidied the formatting up for ease of reading – the NS’s sub-editor/style guide compiler needs shooting, frankly – and added our own commentary (in red) where appropriate. A few quibbles aside, it’s a fascinating and quoteable piece. Have a read.

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A new voice in the referendum debate – ladies and gents, Professor John Curtice!

Thank goodness. We hadn’t seen him on TV in hours, we thought he’d died.

It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.

So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.

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A comment from a reader sent us off on a spot of Googling this morning. If you type nothing but the word “Wimbledon” into the search engine, the top result isn’t actually a link, but instead some sort of unclickable wired-in tournament schedule data.

A striking feature of the data is the national flags beside each contestant. We couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we typed in Andy Murray’s name.

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So proud of my country and its government. Let’s get this done.

Each bright new day brings a fresh game of Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline here at WingsLand Towers, but we were a bit thrown by this morning’s front page.

“Economists say indyref could drive investors away” is pure Magnus, but that four-word qualifier tacked on the end is a bit out of character. What could be going on?

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Seasoned readers will be aware of our as-yet-undiscovered mole at “Better Together” campaign headquarters. This morning the intrepid fifth columnist has managed to scan us the cover of the group’s handbook for activists (and forthcoming YouTube movie).

We’re sure more pages will be on the way soon, most days in the papers.