Wings Over Scotland

FAO John McCormick

Dear Mr McCormick,

Last week you were widely quoted in the press on the subject of voters being informed in advance by both parties in the independence debate of the repercussions of their respective positions winning the vote. For example, your press release stated:

“The Commission has therefore recommended that the UK and Scottish Governments should clarify what process will follow the referendum, for either outcome, so that people have that information before they vote.”

Although your words seem clear to me, they seem not to have been understood by the No campaign. Ruth Davidson and Alistair Darling, for example, have both in recent days indicated their refusal to detail any proposed new devolution settlement, should Scotland reject independence, until AFTER the referendum.

Ms Davidson went so far as to suggest in one TV interview that she thought your comments meant people were unsure whether there would still be a UK Prime Minister after a No vote, and whether UK laws would still apply. As it appears extremely obvious that the “default” position in the event of a No vote would be that everything stayed the same as it is now, it seems unlikely that those were in fact the questions your respondents were asking.

But as we were not privy to your testing, we don’t know specifically which information voters were requesting be made available to them. I wonder, then, if it might be possible for you to issue some clarification on the matter, at least in broad terms.

A great many members of both the UK and Scottish Parliaments were extremely vociferous before the publication of your report in insisting that its recommendations be followed in full by all sides. It would perhaps therefore be valuable if you could be more specific about what sort of information your quote above referred to.

Thanking you in advance,

Rev. Stuart Campbell

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So, wow. Last month we decided to kick on a little bit as an experiment and put more of our time into the site, and the results were dramatic. But the truth of the matter is that we can’t keep up that level every month, because we have to earn a living. And if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.

But here’s a thing: supporters of independence constantly and loudly bemoan the lack of a pro-independence Scottish newspaper, or even just a balanced one committed to the simple old-fashioned goals of fair-minded and truthful reporting.

The last attempt to make a print one crashed and burned a long time ago – as pointedly noted in the image above by Kerry Gill, current political editor of the Scottish Daily Express. And the online Caledonian Mercury, despite being staffed by proper experienced journalists, died (though technically its corpse still twitches faintly once in a while) through a failed funding model, having not found a high enough readership to generate sufficient advertising revenue.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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One of the main reasons we started Wings Over Scotland 15 months ago was a recurring frustration at the Scottish media’s constant failure to represent our views. Time after time we’d sit watching the TV with our blood pressure rising, shouting “Why aren’t you asking this CLEARLY lying idiot the staggeringly bloody obvious question that anyone with a IQ higher than a badger’s bawbag would be asking?” at the screen until the neighbours started banging on the wall again.

We’ve come a long way in 15 months, and we can at least now draw a sizeable audience’s attention to such unasked questions. But the phenomenon hasn’t lessened any, and last night’s Newsnight Scotland provided a textbook example.

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Well, one out of three isn’t bad, we suppose.

We’re a bit confused by point 3, though. “It’s no wonder the SNP support the Government’s plans”, it notes. But hang on a minute – didn’t the No campaign director Blair McDougall tell us just days ago that the SNP “opposed” devolution in 1997? Who to believe? We just don’t know what to think any more.

We know the No campaign is dead set against entering any discussions before the independence referendum, but we were so moved by Willie Rennie’s concern today about Scotland not having enough time to “negotiate over 14,000 international treaties“ in the 16 months between a Yes vote and the first elections to an independent Holyrood that we thought we’d help him out a bit with some advance work.

We did enquire of Mr Rennie as to where these “14,000 international treaties” could be found, but he was too busy helping poor people by fining them £80 a month to answer. Luckily, alert reader Angus McLellan was hot on the case, and swiftly directed us to a handy Foreign Office website featuring the magic number.

We’ve now had a brief skim through some of the UK’s historic agreements with other countries, and to save some time after 2014 we’ve knocked a few off the list.

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Unionists often like to talk about independence in terms of a “divorce” to try to tug at our heart strings and make us feel like we’d be leaving a much-loved partner. The implication, of course, is that divorces are always bad, with losers on both sides.

They get very huffy when independence supporters suggest that it’s more like an abusive marriage, despite our relationship with England being far more like Stockholm Syndrome than they would like to admit. (Something their own “it’s a big, bad world out there, you’ll never survive without us” rhetoric suggests is the case.)

But if we take the metaphor of the United Kingdom being a marriage at face value, then what kind of marriage is it? And more to the point, is it worth saving?

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Since we’re on the subject of Willie Rennie, we may as well have a look at the comments he’s made today in response to the Scottish Government’s publication of its “transition” plans in the event of a Yes vote. A clearer, more dispiriting example of the “We cannae dae it, Cap’n!” mentality would be hard to find.

“Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie insisted today that the SNP has “hopelessly underestimated the scale and complexity” of the task ahead.

“They would have to negotiate over 14,000 international treaties, a currency, the division of assets, membership of NATO and the host of international organisations,” he said.

“To say they will bang all this through in just 16 months is absurd. This will give most people in Scotland the shivers and fuel suspicion that the SNP are just making it up as they go along.”

Now, “making it up as they go along” is a pretty strange reaction in the first place to someone publishing a detailed planning document almost TWO YEARS ahead of the time it would be needed. But let’s humour the poor man and glance through his terrifying list of impossible tasks.

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Willie Rennie once called us “deplorable” and “warped”. This is the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader on yesterday’s Sunday Politics Scotland (around 52 mins), defending the Westminster coalition government’s despicable “Bedroom Tax”.

It turns out that contrary to what you might imagine, throwing thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country onto the streets is actually an act of kindness. If you’re struggling a little bit trying to figure out how that works, let Willie explain it:

“Actually it’s difficult for people who are trying to get into work if they’ve got the burden of having to pay for a house they can’t really afford, it makes it much more difficult – they’re going to have to earn more to make work pay. What we’re trying to do here is improve social mobility, so that people can get into work. This prevents them, and that’s why we need to take action.”

Did you get that, readers? People with disabled children who have enough bedrooms for all their kids to sleep in are actually suffering under a terrible burden, which Willie’s millionaire mates in the UK government are going to heroically relieve them of by, er, fining them £80 a month. This, you see, will somehow make it easier for them to find work and improve their social mobility.

How will their having much less money achieve that? Well, because… um… it… er… maybe their kids… uh… nope, it’s gone. We’ve got nothing, readers. If anyone can explain to us how having to keep your disabled child in a cupboard helps you get a job and become upwardly mobile, help us out, eh?

It’s one of the defining mysteries of the independence debate so far. The Scottish Government says that an independent Scotland would remain an EU member at all times before, during and after the process of dissolving the UK, with the precise terms being negotiated. The UK Government, meanwhile, insists that Scotland would be thrown out of the EU and have to reapply for membership.

The EU has said it’s happy to settle this dispute, but only on receipt of a request from the UK Government to issue a definitive position. The Scottish Government has urged the UK Government to do so, but the UK Government refuses, despite its professed confidence in its view and the huge propaganda victory that would presumably result.

We can only assume that the UK Government is too busy to write the letter, occupied as it is with destroying the British economy and society. So as a helpful time-saving gesture of goodwill and in the interests of informed debate, we’ve done it for them.

We’re even happy to put a stamp on it, pop out (we need milk anyway) and stick it in the postbox ourselves. Just say the word, Prime Minister.

This is “No” campaign director Blair McDougall, telling lies:

“There’s one thing that’s absolutely certain – if the nationalists get a Yes vote, Scotland will be leaving the UK and so we’ll be leaving the European Union.”

That’s a lie, isn’t it, Blair? It couldn’t possibly be any more clearly a lie. Nobody actually believes that Scotland will “leave” the European Union as a result of a Yes vote. No matter how much they deliberately spin, misrepresent and mislead about the EC President’s comments, nobody honestly believes that there will be so much as a single solitary day on which Scottish people are not EU citizens. (Unless, of course, they choose to stay in the UK and the Tories then take the whole UK out.)

Even the feeble semantic-hairsplitting defence that an independent Scotland might for a split second technically “leave” the EU while negotiations over the precise terms of membership were concluded and amended is anything but “absolutely certain”. Such a scenario is, in fact, a hugely unlikely, but strictly speaking astronomically-small theoretical possibility, so irrational that a lunatic might clutch desperately at it. Either way, we would in every meaningful sense remain in the EU.

The only absolute certainty here is that Blair McDougall is a liar.

This came out quite a few days ago, but didn’t get the attention it merited. Once again, we invite readers to ponder the “invisible hypothetical” of whether the Scottish media would have shown such complete disinterest in a piece of investigative journalism which revealed an elected representative of the SNP and some of its prominent activists discussing their own party’s complete uselessness.

We do accept that Scottish Labour being in shambolic disarray isn’t exactly hold-the-front-page stuff, and is in fact somewhere on a par with “Rain forecast for Hebrides” or “Scottish rugby team beaten at Twickenham”. But clearly the bar for headline stories is rather lower than it used to be, so you’d think it’d at least get a passing mention.

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