Wings Over Scotland

(I've been meaning to write this piece for months, but – not entirely unrelatedly – have been rather neglecting WoSland in favour of another site whose readers ARE in fact prepared to pay a very modest price for journalism. But what the heck, let's do it now.)

Today has seen the much-trailed worldwide release of Real Racing 3 for the iOS platforms. The controversial "free-to-play" game has a horrendous IAP structure which forces players to have to either wait for hours and hours (and hours) at paywalls between sessions or cough up a mindboggling fortune to play it continuously.

This, contrary to what you might think, is a good thing.

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If you’re a banker in a small country and you criminally destroy the entire national economy out of personal and corporate greed, you go to jail.

If you’re a banker in a large country and you criminally destroy the entire national economy out of personal and corporate greed, a laughably small fine is imposed and you get to keep everything your fraudulent actions helped you line your pockets with.

If you’re a small Scottish football club and you field an improperly-registered player once, by accident, you forfeit the match and are disqualified from the tournament.

If you’re a large Scottish football club and you field numerous improperly-registered players, repeatedly and deliberately, to gain an unfair advantage, a laughably small fine (which will never be paid) is imposed on a completely different and bankrupt company, and you get to keep everything the unregistered players in question helped you win.

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There’s an interesting story on the BBC website this morning on the subject of EU membershi- WAIT! COME BACK! Honestly, it really IS quite interesting!

The UK state broadcaster’s Scottish outpost has undertaken what could under certain conditions be described as journalism, by conducting a survey of 27 EU member states (plus imminent newcomer Croatia) to find out their view of what an independent Scotland’s status would be. 23 of the 28 either ignored the Beeb’s request or wouldn’t commit to an opinion, but the teeny Baltic state of Latvia (pop. 2.2m, EU member since 2004) pluckily threw its 2-Lats-worth into the debate.

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Better Together leaked posters #11: a special message from Ian Davidson.

(Mole at BT HQ: "Free Scotland".)

In political terms, being an MP is a bit of a poisoned chalice of a job. You ostensibly get elected to represent your constituents, but in reality to represent your party leader. Unless you manage to land yourself a ministerial job you’re basically nothing but a vote on legs, told what to say and ordered through the division lobby by party whips like a ewe in a sheepdog trial, under the constant threat of being overlooked for plum spots on committees or even deselected.

Now don’t worry, readers. Wings Over Scotland isn’t going soft. We have precious little sympathy to spare for career politicians troughing for all they’re worth on a £65,000 salary typically inflated to somewhere comfortably over £100,000 by allowances and perks, and accompanied by incredibly generous redundancy payments and pensions the likes of which us poor saps can only dream of.

But still, it’s no job for anyone with any dignity or self-respect. MPs are loathed by the public more than almost any other profession (other than bankers, with whom most people think they rhyme), very often justifiably so, and most will achieve nothing in their lives other than self-enrichment. It’s a soul-destroying way to get yourself a couple of nice houses at the taxpayer’s expense.

There’s a much less corrosive way to be an MP, though.

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It’s old news, but someone finally dug up the actual leaflet. Click for the reason!

If the YesScotland campaign had its wits about it, it’d be running off a million of these with this week’s news stories printed in bold on the back.

We apologise to all readers for the extra-flaky performance of the site today. The ridiculously, needlessly convoluted process of moving domain should be complete by tomorrow, and we should be in maximum effect at our brand-new, altogether-more-robust location by Friday. And we thank, once again, everyone who contributed to the donations that made that move possible.

We’ve already asked this question on Twitter (no answers yet), but we should open it up here too. In the light of today’s piece by Stewart Bremner, we’ve been racking our brains trying to think if anyone has moved, in public, from being a Yes vote to a No – or even a Don’t Know – since, let’s say, the SNP’s victory in 2007, the point at which a referendum started to become a real possibility rather than just an abstract concept.

That’s almost six years ago now. Surely SOMEONE must have been won over by the Unionists’ arguments or by the slick, positive, coherent “Better Together” campaign? There’s no shortage of testimonies from people moving, or at least edging, the other way. Even the Sunday Mail is starting to waver a little, for Heaven’s sake.

But we haven’t heard of a single, solitary human in all those six years of intensified constitutional debate who’d previously supported independence having announced to the world that it’s a bad idea and we’re better off in the bosom of Mother UK after all.

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For a long time if felt like a dirty secret. It’s how we’ve been conditioned. It was simply something that you just didn’t speak about, because most people around you would look down on you if they knew.

Those feelings are something that many who believe in an independent Scotland have encountered at some point in our lives. Up until recently I very much felt that way, and to this day I’m still wary of mentioning my Scottish independence yearning in some circles. But times are changing.

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Our story of this morning raised an interesting issue in the comments, namely whether sites like this one are actually helping to prop up the Scottish mainstream media by linking to its articles and thereby generating web traffic, page rankings and money for what is too often a toxic and dishonest propaganda tool for the Union.

For some time, readers have occasionally pointed this out to us and urged us not to help them, so that their deaths might be hastened. But here’s the conflict: we have no desire to destroy Scottish journalism, only to keep it honest.

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We’re indebted to an alert reader for pointing us towards this intriguing story:

“For knowingly selling paid links, The Scotsman and JP’s regional news sites were not removed from the search results – you can still find The Scotsman’s site if you perform a brand related navigational search. They have however, had their pagerank scores reduced drastically, and Google now trusts them less. The Scotsman’s pagerank dropped from 7 to 3, most of Johnston Press’ regional sites involved had their pagerank reduced to 0.

For the Scotsman website, this is a disaster. Dropping to a pagerank of 3 means that the search engine rankings they used to command for generic searches are gone – most likely for good. So – declining brand-led traffic and negligible Google search traffic for the foreseeable future. No new visitors from Google, and declining brand loyalty. The Scotsman website just became a very tough sell to any potential advertiser.”

Click the words for more details about how an increasingly discredited Scottish mainstream media is resorting to desperate measures to survive, then consider if you might want to fund more honest reporting, lest you be left with none at all.

One of the main weapons in the arsenal of the No campaign is to induce fear in the public over their pensions. It’s a strategy based on the generally inadequate knowledge that most of us have over our pensions, so the “Better Together” coalition has been handing out flyers proclaiming that “the pensions of 1 million Scots are guaranteed by remaining in the UK” – the implication being that outside of the UK they wouldn’t be.

But since we can generally assume the contents of their leaflets to be somewhat economical with the truth, what would happen to our pensions after independence?

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