Wings Over Scotland

A FOREIGN POLICY

Margaret Curran should know the truth
Of engaging brain before opening mooth;
Using the word “foreigner”
Like a profanity
Offends large sections of humanity.

She should know better and be more carin’

Each one of us is a Jock Tamson bairn;

To hear an apology would be divine,
But don’t hold your breath – I won’t hold mine.

The No campaign makes for some unlikely bedfellows.

We’d like you to meet our new favourite patriots.

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It’s not the first time we’ve had to raise this subject. But as the rhetoric ramps up from an increasingly nasty and unhappy No camp, we have to ask again – just what is the Labour Party’s problem with foreigners?

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Below is a short extract from an interview between Margaret Curran and BBC Radio Scotland’s Derek Bateman on Good Morning Scotland last week.

The whole thing is very much worth a listen, but this bit jumped out.

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Following our visit to the Netherlands and Belgium a couple of days ago, and today’s examination of the (non-existent) threat of border controls between an independent Scotland and the rUK, we thought it’d be nice to finish the week with a whistlestop tour of some more of our favourite international borders.

It’s perhaps worth noting that several of these are between EU and non-EU countries, or even between two non-EU countries. The one above, though, is Denmark/Germany.

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This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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12 months into the official independence campaign, if the mainstream media is to be believed the Yes Scotland campaign isn’t doing too well. On the few occasions when the organisation isn’t being assumed to be merely a synonym for “the SNP”, it’s to allow some comment to the effect that they are “on the back foot” or has suffered another “setback” of some kind.

To be fair, it’s not only the media who have been critical. Many committed independence supporters have expressed mixed feelings about the official Yes campaign, usually along the lines of it not being proactive enough or sufficiently vigorous is dealing with this or that. Is such criticism justified? Are the media offering a fair analysis of Yes Scotland’s management of the campaign?

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This, in case you didn’t see it on our Twitter feed, was on the front page of the Independent website this morning (and indeed still is). It wasn’t a mistake.

The piece featured the Scottish author discussing various pieces of news from the past week (the guest is different every Saturday). Topics included Ed Miliband’s suitability to be Prime Minister (or lack thereof), Stephen King’s objections to e-books, corporate tax avoidance and anonymity for people who’ve been arrested.

But while the paper chose to lead with Scottish independence for its headline, for some reason it didn’t carry a picture of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon or Blair Jenkins, nor even of Rankin himself, whose words the headline comprised.

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Can anyone explain to us the fundamental difference between “I wouldn’t want my son to be a foreigner” and “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry a black man”? Because we’re not at all sure that we can locate it.

We were hunting through a load of 1980s issues of 2000AD earlier today, looking for something else altogether, when we stumbled across this. It seemed somehow timely.

We can’t think why.

We don’t normally pick out individual stories from the Sealand Gazette and put them on the front page, but, well, you’ll see why we’ve done it today in a few seconds’ time.

The piece below is from the Ilford Recorder, a newspaper in north-east London.

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Readers will be aware that while we still link to articles in the Scotsman, we rarely encourage anyone to read pieces by Brian Wilson or Michael Kelly. Both generally issue furious, barely-coherent rants consumed by a blind, absolute tribal hatred of anything in any way connected to the SNP and/or independence, and amount to little more than professional trolling.

We’re not going to make an exception for Wilson’s latest, a spittle-flecked diatribe (fuelled by the Scotsman’s favourite useful idiot Jim Sillars) about how the idea that an independent Scotland could have an open border with the rUK is “ridiculous”, and that there would have to be border controls and passport checks. If you really want to read it you can go and find it for yourself.

But we thought it might be interesting to see if we could find a couple of comparable neighbouring countries (eschewing the obvious example of Ireland, which is for some reason apparently invisible to Unionists) and see how they handled it.

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