Wings Over Scotland

Had yesterday’s podcast been going out today instead, I’d probably have chosen this as the play-out music. But it’ll do just fine right now too.

Just for fun, then, let’s have our guesses. I’d love to see Alex Salmond stand up in Holyrood this afternoon and announce that the historic first chance for Scots to choose their own destiny will take place on Saturday 25th October 2014, because that means the result would arrive on my birthday the following Monday. But I don’t think he will.

The official Wings Over Scotland prediction is Thursday 2nd October 2014.

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And, um, also another person, can now be heard on episode 20 of the Scottish Independence Podcast, featuring regular host Michael Greenwell and your humble correspondent rambling on about the this and the that (and occasionally the other) of Scottish politics. It’s a right riveting listen, and if you don’t like it you can always skip straight to the end for a nice tune.

The 36-minute podcast can be downloaded, played live or subscribed to on iTunes.

Well, what a curious day this is shaping up as. As we scoured our Twitter feed in vain after the bewildering media blackout on the workfare vote, we also discovered that “Better Together” has been running around half the internet trying to censor a satirical video. To cut a long story short, you can download a copy of the video by right-clicking on the image below and choosing “Save As…” or “Save Link As…”.

(NB: Don’t left-click, as it will attempt to stream it and fail.)

We invite the No campaign to see if they can have it pulled from this site.

But that wasn’t the end. As people started to read our story on the workfare motion, we began to get tweets and comments questioning the quote we’d used, as it didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the article on the website. Confused, we went and had a look, and sure enough the original version had vanished, replaced by something much shorter and far more innocuous.

Luckily this isn’t our first time with internet censorship. At the time of writing there’s still a cached version of the original, and when that disappears you can read it here.

We’re not quite sure what’s happening today, but we don’t like it.

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This article* puts our feelings about the actions of the three London parties in the House Of Commons today better (or at the very least, more concisely and with considerably more restraint) than we could ourselves.

The SNP, Plaid Cymru, the sole Green and about 40 of 258 Labour MPs opposed the motion, which was only able to be rushed through because of Labour’s co-operation with the government. Everyone else either voted for it or abstained. The rule of law means nothing any more, and neither does democracy. Better together, right?

*The link now points to a saved version. The original has been mysteriously replaced.

An alert viewer directs us to the Scottish FA’s “Supporter Registration Page”. Click the image below for a bigger picture, but a much smaller sense of self-worth.

We have a vague nagging sensation that something seems to be missing from that list of nationalities, but we just can’t quite put our finger on it. We’re sure it’ll come to us.

The usage of Nazi terminology to refer to any actions of a democratically-elected UK government is nearly always an absurd and unhelpful exaggeration. Today, however, one such analogy is absolutely literally justified.

The words “Arbeit Macht Frei” were emblazoned, usually in iron, over the gates of numerous concentration and extermination camps in 1930s and 1940s Germany, most infamously Dachau and Auschwitz. The phrase is usually rendered in English as “work makes you free”, though a more precise translation of the first word is “labour”.

That the same exhortation is used in Britain in 2013 by The Salvation Army tells you all you need to know about the ideological climate of the modern United Kingdom.

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Diligent readers will know that this site is engaged in a lonely and difficult quest to find out what Labour’s actual policy on the Bedroom Tax is. And in attempting to establish the facts of the matter, it’s important to differentiate a policy from an opinion.

The latter are in plentiful supply – Labour, we’re told repeatedly, is “against” the tax. Check out, for example, this intriguing exchange on Twitter. (Click for full version.)

Jamie Glackin is a member of Labour’s Scottish Executive Committee, so you think he’d have a fairly firm grasp of the party’s policies, but he’s oddly evasive regarding the Bedroom Tax. Asked by SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter if Labour would scrap the tax, Glackin dodges by saying “Don’t think it will get that far. It’s a dead duck.”

But he’s far from alone in not wanting to answer that question.

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Only the special ineptitude of the Scotsman could make the task of downloading a simple PDF into a near-impossible trial suitable for the Krypton Factor. We don’t advise you bother trying to get yourself a copy of “Scotland Decides” (the paper’s compilation of its eight-week series of pro- and anti-independence essays) from its own website unless you have a fetish for frustration, but thanks to the sterling efforts of Peter Bell we have a local copy here for you without all the dicking around.

The contents of the document, when all taken together, are revealing.

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Brigadoon is the story of a Scottish village which only appears for one day every hundred years. GERSland, on the other hand, is a country – similar to Scotland in many ways – which has appeared, albeit fleetingly, every year since 1999.

GERSland too suffers from Caledonian Antisyzygy – it is simultaneously like Scotland and unlike it. It is not Scotland as we know it and it’s not a glimpse of an independent Scotland either, despite the dogged insistence of countless journalists, analysts and commentators less insightful than Wings Over Scotland’s on presenting it as such.

It is, as the lawyers say, sui generis, or a special case.

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