Wings Over Scotland

There’s a rather interesting story buried deep down in the dusty undergrowth of the Scotsman’s politics section today, featuring Jeremy Purvis of the cross-party “Devo Plus” (remember THEM?) group, which apparently marks its anniversary this month.

Purvis’s campaign (also featuring former Tory Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson and, um, we’re sure we’ll recall the others shortly) pretty much died at birth – its Twitter account last saw action on November 30 last year and we can’t even tell when the website was last updated because it has no timestamps, but it was a LONG time ago. He seems to have sensed an opportunity today, though, and has called on what the Scotsman rather startlingly refers to as “the anti-independence parties” to support Devo +’s proposals to devolve full tax powers to Holyrood in the event of a No vote.

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We’re still mulling over the exclusive design/logo for “Heroes” in the fundraising campaign, but we were so pleased with this when we came up with it this morning that we thought it was too good to limit to people with lots of money.

It’s also the first Megastore sub-section with the new version of our masthead logo, designed to show progress from 2012 to 2013. (Last year we’d just found our old wings in the attic, now we’ve well and truly got them on. Not sure what we’re going to do for 2014 yet, maybe patch up all the holes.)

We might do a special version or exclusive colour run for Heroes or something, or come up with something different entirely. For now, click the image to see the product range, or just simply look at it and bask in our genius 😉

We’re becoming increasingly concerned that perhaps Scotland SHOULD extinguish any remaining vestiges of independence and allow itself to be incorporated into a Greater England, if our education system is anything to go by.

We’ve highlighted on several occasions a catastrophically poor grasp of arithmetic in the Scottish populace, although for some reason it seems to be restricted to those intending to vote No in the referendum.

“20 times 10 is 500” is bad even for Rangers fans, though.

We were pretty stunned after the first 24 hours of our fundraising project, and we’re barely any less dumbfounded after another week.

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Unionists never miss a chance to sneer at “Braveheart”, a film which won five Oscars and tells a true story (very heavily embellished by Hollywood) about a people’s fight for self-determination. Only last night, Scotland Tonight retweeted one eager young No voter using it as an explanation for the increase in support for independence among the 18-24 demographic, even though the film came out almost 20 years ago.

This sort of thing, though, is fine:

That’s because nationalism is great, so long as it’s British.

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There’s a faintly astonishing story in today’s Scotsman. As if belatedly realising the damage that they’d done to the No campaign by detailing Labour’s toys-out-of-pram tantrum in the House Of Commons this week, the paper runs a firefighting exercise of a follow-up piece which reveals no new information, but gives the party a helpful platform from which to try to winch itself out of the hole.

(A “senior party source” duly obliged with the comically-absurd assertion that “the party’s main concern was that without a reference to independence, an MP could be stopped from speaking for going off the subject.”)

That’s not the astonishing part, of course – giving Unionist parties a platform is what the Scotsman exists for. The amazing thing is the size of the gulf between what the story reports as the reason for the debate’s cancellation and what the person whose debate it was had already said in public a full day earlier.

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Fans of TV panel shows will probably be aware of a regular strand on the BBC’s Mock The Week called “Between The Lines”, in which one comedian delivers lines from a speech in the persona of a public figure, while the other translates what they really mean. There’s a chucklesome example here.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to have our own attempt, with a letter sent out this week to the No campaign’s mailing list by the independence debate’s own Hugh Dennis: “Better Together” campaign director and creative truth interpreter Blair McDougall.

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As veteran readers will know, we like to keep our blogroll fresh so that it offers only the leanest and juiciest collection of unmissable sites for when you’ve devoured every last page of Wings Over Scotland. This month we’ve had a small prune to make room for some new blood, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.

Out go the Herald and Scotsman because, hey, you know fine where the Herald and Scotsman are. That freed a couple of slots which we’ve given to the all-encompassing “Dundee wifey” Subrosa and Liberal Democrat Voters For Independence, both very welcome additions which broaden our outlook considerably.

We’ve also hoofed the Spectator’s braying Fraser Nelson out of the Zany Comedy Relief section for not gracing us with any Scottish-themed doltishness in weeks, and his replacement is a grassroots Labour blog that we think you’re going to love to bits. Ladies and gents, please revel in the positive case for the Union that is Niko’s Bar.

Otherwise, as you were. Suggestions always welcomed.

Never let it be said that Wings Over Scotland isn’t the sort of fair-minded site that would acknowledge when the Scottish press prints some reasonable and balanced commentary once in a while:

“The last time I wrote about the tone of the debate on Scottish independence, I came to the conclusion that there was little to choose between the two sides in the quality of the arguments and the calm or intelligence with which they were presented.

Since then, there has been something of an improvement on the nationalist side, perhaps through entrusting the presentation to Nicola Sturgeon rather than to other politicians I could name. But there has been an appalling deterioration on the unionist side.”

(Michael Fry in today’s Scotsman.)

In coverage of the latest Ipsos-MORI Scottish Public Opinion Monitor poll, the media will likely focus as usual on the not-particularly-dramatic headline figures, showing a welcome but not enormously relevant (so far away from the vote) swing of 3.5% to Yes. What we find much more interesting is the data a couple of pages down.

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We’ve spoken before on this site about a couple of political concepts based around different ways of winning votes by bombarding the electorate with untruths so relentlessly that they come to be accepted as fact.

One of them, the “Big Lie”, was a term infamously coined by Hitler to describe a strategy regularly deployed by the Nazis in which a falsehood would be perpetrated which was so diametrically and spectacularly at odds with the reality, people would instinctively reject the thought that anyone would have the bare-faced audacity to say it if it wasn’t true, and therefore it must be.

Language needs some kind of brand new term, though, to accurately encapsulate the magnitude of what Scottish Labour have just tried to pull off.

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