Wings Over Scotland

An alert reader pointed something interesting out to us this morning. STV News, the Telegraph and the Paisley Daily Express all carry an almost word-for-word-identical story (the only one with a byline is the Telegraph’s version, which credits it to the grumpy-looking Josie Ensor), all three of them headlined with slight variations on the phrase “Over 60 per cent unconvinced on Scottish independence”.

It refers to a poll conducted for the “Better Together” campaign, and reports its findings accurately. Or to be more precise, reports some of its findings.

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Sunday Herald, 28 April 2013:

“The Better Together campaign has many faults. It is tedious, piecemeal, relentlessly negative, and a factory for an endless supply of scare stores.

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We stumbled across this quite by accident yesterday. We think you’ll enjoy it.

The clip is from last year, and was aired on Canadian national news channel Sun News. Douglas Murray is a British writer who claims to be half-Scottish on account of unspecified links to Unionist breeding ground the Isle of Lewis, popular haunt of No-camp luminaries like Alistair Darling, virulent Labour anti-devolutionist Brian Wilson and controversial “Better Together” donor Ian Taylor.

Murray studied at Eton and Oxford and writes for august UK journals like the Spectator and Guardian, as well as appearing on numerous BBC political shows. For some reason, the Canadians consider him an expert on Scottish politics, qualified to inform and enlighten their viewers. See what you think.

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Emphasis, as always, is ours.

“STATEMENT BY SCOTTISH COOPERATIVE PARTY EXECUTIVE

The Scottish Co-operative Party’s 2011 manifesto is one full of co-operative and mutual solutions to the challenges faced in Scotland, issues of independence, devolution or the constitutional settlement did not feature. The annual Co-operative Party conference has passed motions which promote a view of Scotland playing a vital role in a United Kingdom.

We have noted the personal comments made by Mary Lockhart, a long serving Co-operative Party and Labour Party member. Mary has been a great advocate for co-operative and mutual solutions. Whilst we recognise that members of political parties hold differing, sometimes opposite, positions the views Mary has expressed are not shared by the Party. Mary has offered her resignation from the role of Chair of the Scottish Co-operative Party and the Scottish Executive committee has accepted this.“

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The BBC’s flagship satirical programme “Have I Got News For You” is, of course, comedy. The tone of the opening minutes of last night’s episode was a little uglier and nastier than the usual friendly inter-regional jibes (normally delivered by the likes of Jeremy Clarkson and accompanied by rebukes from the rest of the panel), but it really wasn’t anything to get overly worked up about. Comedy isn’t always cuddly.

It must have been a little uncomfortable for the No camp, though.

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(The first of our hopefully-regular weekend cartoons on the week’s big issue.)

Hang on. The heart of the latest No campaign/media scare story is that the enormous pension deficit currently looming over the UK like a great big multi-billion-pound fiscal sword of Damocles (but which everyone is feverishly avoiding looking at) will become much more urgent in the event of Scottish independence, because according to EU rules “cross-border” pensions can’t just boot the problem into the long grass for years, and have to ensure any shortfall is funded immediately.

EU rules? But haven’t the Unionists spent most of the last six months telling us that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be an EU member, and would have to wait years at the back of the queue to join as a new country? Phew! Problem solved!

We already know that the No camp has, shall we say, a bit of difficulty when it comes to basic arithmetic. But rarely do they demonstrate it so eagerly as they did last night.

We very much appreciate their helping to make our job easier.

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You’ve probably noticed there’s been quite a lot going on here recently, but we’re not neglecting the wonderful people who contributed to our hugely successful fundraiser.

The first version of our Credits page is now live.

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We’re indebted to an alert reader (as previously noted, we default to not naming people who send us tip-offs and the like so as not to get them in trouble at work or anything, but will happily credit you if you ask) for an excellent piece of initiative today.

“16 April 2013

Dear Ministry of Defence,

A couple of weeks ago the PM told us we were at threat of nuclear attack by North Korea. Living in Glasgow, what is the procedure if they do launch, where do I go? How do the MOD protect us – can they shoot the missile down? How will I know we are under attack? If they do launch, Trident isn’t much use, is it? Can Trident shoot down a missile? The South Koreans have Patriot missiles, do we? Are they any good? What are you doing to protect Glasgow?

Yours faithfully and very concerned,
[alert WingsLand reader]”

You can read the MoD’s reply below. Our emphases, as always.

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Much as we like to mock Scottish Labour for their deep-seated terror of stating a firm policy position on any subject whatsoever (other than “SNP BAD”, of course), we have to give credit where it’s due. Last weekend, Johann Lamont finally comprehensively addressed a subject she’s been ducking since before this website even existed.

Under the inquisitorial gaze of the BBC’s remorseless Brian Taylor, Lamont bit the bullet and laid out her position once and for all, in simple plain-speaking terms, on Britain’s nuclear deterrent. The BBC website is a little bit flaky with video, so we’ve transcribed the six-minute exchange for you below. Let that be an end to the matter.

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Amazingly, it’s now been a whole year (plus two days) since we unexpectedly found ourselves top of a poll of most-read Scottish political blogs conducted by Scot Goes Pop. As we’ve now got a pretty sizeable readership, we thought it might be interesting to pick up the baton and conduct a similar survey for ourselves this year.

Below is a list of all the active Scottish political blogs we could think of. (We’ve been fairly liberal with the definition of “active”, hence the inclusion of LabourHame.) The criteria were pretty simple – the content of each site had to be chiefly about Scottish politics, and it had to be a proper website/blog (so we’ve excluded writers who are exclusively newspaper columnists with no site of their own, which knocked out the likes of Ian Bell, Alan Cochrane and Kevin McKenna). Facebook doesn’t cut it.

(We’ve included as many Unionist blogs/sites as we could find, but they’re remarkably thin on the ground, as we noted around the turn of the year. Even the once-tireless Councillor Alex “Braveheart” Gallagher has given up since last October.)

If you’re unfamiliar with any of the sites listed, you’ll find most of them in our links column over to the right. In the first poll (about which blogs you actually read on a regular basis in 2013) you can tick as many boxes as you like, and in the second we’d like you to choose your single favourite. Both polls close at midnight on Sunday.

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