Wings Over Scotland

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.”

(Yawn.)

We expect we’ll be running this most weeks.

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.

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The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:

“Blair Jenkins, the campaign’s chief executive, published [Yes To A Just Scotland] hours after suffering an embarrassing defeat in a mock referendum at Glasgow University, where students rejected independence by a margin of two to one.”

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.

Last year (24 June 2012, to be precise):

“Homeowners could face a £1 billion rise in mortgage payments in an independent Scotland, Treasury axeman Danny Alexander has warned.

The world’s leading credit rating agencies earlier this year warned Scotland would not be guaranteed the UK’s AAA borrowing status.”

This year:

“The UK has lost its top AAA credit rating for the first time since 1978 on expectations that growth will ‘remain sluggish over the next few years’.

The ratings agency Moody’s became the first to cut the UK from its highest rating, to Aa1. Moody’s said that the government’s debt reduction programme faced significant ‘challenges’ ahead.”

Nice to know we didn’t have to wait for independence, eh?

Today’s press is full of reports on the Glasgow University independence referendum, in which the vote went 62-38 against on a turnout variously reported as 11%, 12% and 13%. (To our considerable surprise, this dismal level of interest was in fact regarded as a triumph, and vastly above the usual amount of engagement with student politics.)

Fewer than 2,600 people voted – despite the ballot being held somewhere students had to go anyway – so the results are barely as authoritative as a typical opinion poll. They do suggest a couple of reasonably interesting things, though.

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This sort of thing does seem to be happening with disturbing frequency at the august offices of the Scotsman these days. Yesterday’s paper ran a story under the stark headline “EU budget cuts ‘will favour the English’, says SNP”.

[EDIT: Also spun into a truly vile column by Michael Kelly today.]

You’ve been playing this game a while now, readers. See if you can guess which words from the headline don’t actually appear anywhere in the story.

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This is the text of yesterday’s radio interview between BBC Scotland’s Glenn Campbell and Lord Malloch-Brown, the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations who also served as a Foreign Office minister in the last UK Labour government. It seems reasonable to suggest that (a) he’s not a rabid SNP stooge, and (b) he’s a pretty good authority on how Europe works.

The interview starts with the response to a question we don’t get to hear, and we’ve excised a few “um”s, “you know”s and “I mean”s for readability. All emphasis is ours. The transcript is otherwise verbatim.

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A realistic, informed and expert assessment of an independent Scotland’s relationship with Europe was accidentally reported by the BBC this morning. It’s chilly here today so we’re going to have to warm up our transcribing fingers for those who can’t access streams, but in the meantime the rest of you can listen to the audio.

This guy’s on your team. Congratulations on that.

(We’re particularly impressed by the attack on Nicola Sturgeon, just days after a poll found her to be the most popular politician in Scotland, and probably Britain. Genius.)

At the last Scottish Parliament election, UKIP secured 0.52% of the vote, a little over half the share achieved by the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party. We’re not sure why the press doesn’t give their leader, whoever it is, more front covers.

This is a letter sent to the Scotsman this week, as yet unpublished by the newspaper, in response to this. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

SIR – I have read David Maddox’s article on Scotland and Catalonia (19th February 2013). As a Catalan that has lived and worked in Scotland for many years and also as a former Representative of the Government of Catalonia to the UK, I was surprised by the contents of the article.

The relations between Scotland and Catalonia have traditionally been excellent and since devolution they have become even better. How would you otherwise explain the lessons learnt from the Catalan political system when designing the devolution settlement for Scotland?; or the Scottish and Catalan governments Protocol of Cooperation signed in 2002?; or the symbolism associated with the fact that the Scottish Parliament was built by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles?; or even the extremely successful visit of the First Minister Salmond to Catalonia just a few years ago? These are powerful statements of friendship between two countries.

Catalans, and the rest of the world, know that Scotland is at the most important crossroads of the last 300 years. Now it is time for Scots to decide the future of its nation. We wish Scotland and its people well and we are very pleased to see that Scotland’s future is in the best possible hands.

Xavier Solano i Bello
Tiltman Place
London