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.
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.
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.
We’re indebted to an alert reader for pointing us towards this intriguing story:
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?
Showbiz news from yesterday’s Daily Record:
“In a shameful confession that will shock their fans, cheeky TV duo Ant and Dec have admitted that one of them… voted Tory. The Geordie lads, back on ITV tonight on Saturday Night Takeaway, revealed all in a no-holds-barred interview in which they also said they’d taken drugs.
Asked about their political allegiances, the pair said they have both always voted Labour until the last election, when Ant voted Conservative for the first time. He told the Guardian’s Weekend magazine the decision would make his family in the North East of England “very angry”.
Ant said: “They certainly couldn’t give an argument for Labour for me at the moment – not a valid one. Then again, I’d struggle to give an argument for voting Conservative at the moment.””
It’s an understandable view.
A powerful reality check from Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald:
“Scotland bailed out the UK economy in the 1980s with Scottish oil revenues, and received precious little in return except factory closures and the highest mortality rates in Europe. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that any improvement in the UK economy is going to happen in London and the southeast, rather than in Scotland. Like the high-speed rail link, it might eventually extend to Manchester but no further. Scotland is on its own whether it likes it or not.”
We must admit, the “Red Paper Collective” – dragged up for a quote today by the Herald’s Magnus Gardham – was a new entity on us. A quick Google reveals that they seem to be a Labour Party offshoot, a fact Gardham unaccountably neglected to mention in his piece describing them merely as “trade union activists”.
So we perhaps shouldn’t waste too much time paying attention to their critical views about “Yes To A Just Scotland”, the document released by the official Yes campaign today. But one line does rather beg to be highlighted for the contempt in which the No campaign evidently holds the people of Scotland.
The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:
Actual result of referendum: 62-38, a margin of 1.6/1.
Size of Mr Johnson’s casual exaggeration: 25%. (1.6 x 1.25 = 2)
But seriously, though – what is it about believing in the Union that apparently renders educated people suddenly unable to count? We have no idea, but it may go some way to explaining the UK’s credit-rating downgrade.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
