A traditional brainteaser to test your Alert Reader Quotient for 2014. All the answers can be found somewhere on Wings (though not always in the obvious places).
Using the Search facility is cheating.
If the mark of a strong democracy is a free and diverse press, Scotland has been in a terrible state for a very long time. On the morning of the independence referendum, the biggest issue the country’s addressed in over 300 years, not a single publication could be found on Scottish newsagents’ shelves backing the constitutional option supported by almost half the population.
Today that changed.
Our favourite Scottish Labour activist and media starlet reacts to the news that the promises of a No vote saving the Clyde shipyards have turned out to be lies.
Let’s just be clear – that’s unequivocal, unambiguous support for condemning the Govan shipyards to certain death, losing thousands of Scottish jobs, going back on promises just months old, so long as it might save the UK Treasury a few quid which the current government would probably spend on more tax cuts for billionaires.
Well, if that doesn’t save a party currently languishing on an average of about 24% in the Scottish opinion polls and help to win back the trust and support of Scottish voters, we simply don’t know what will. Solidarity, brothers and sisters.
All 250,000 copies of the Wee Blue Book have now left the printers and should have reached their destinations, from which they’ll be spread far and wide. Many are already in Yes shops and on street stalls and thousands are in the hands of the public.
If you’ve got one, please read it and PASS IT ON afterwards – we’ll print truckloads of souvenir editions after a Yes vote, so you don’t need to hang onto it as a keepsake. It’s no good adorning the mantelpiece, it needs to be in front of undecideds and soft No voters. (Or hard ones if you think there’s even a sliver of light in their minds.)
We don’t have a definitive list of where the books can be found – the Yes movement is an organic grassroots network and there’s no way of predicting where they’ll end up after the pallet comes off the printers’ lorry. We’ve shipped boxes to Shetland, Skye, Stornoway and Selkirk and all points in between. (Some not beginning with “S”.)
But we’ll keep you updated when we hear of sightings. The info hotline is our Twitter feed, and you can also keep an eye on the dedicated Wee Blue Facebook page.
Meanwhile, though, there’s other stuff you can do.
At the weekend, hundreds of people (estimates of the actual number, as is traditional, varied wildly according to who was counting) protested against BBC bias at the state broadcaster’s Pacific Quay headquarters in Glasgow. There was a very great amount of sneering on social media among No campaigners and journalists at the peaceful, good-natured gathering, for such is the character of No campaigners and journalists.
A small group of readers of this site were among those who attended the protest. They were carrying a Wings Over Scotland banner, and some people had photographs taken with it, which naturally led to more sneering, such as this:
So far so unremarkable. That’s a jibe aimed at me rather than the wee kids in the pic, and I’m fair game. But then a gang of usual-suspects No types piled in on Labour and “Better Together” activist Hothersall’s tweet, and things got a little ugly.
And welcome. If you’ve come to our humble little site to see the nasty man at the head of the “highly controversial cyber organisation” described in this hilarious article, there’s a couple of things you should probably know. Because – and we apologise if this comes as a shock to you – the Daily Mail doesn’t always tell the truth.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Yes Glasgow has been inviting No speakers to take part in this Thursday’s event for literally months. They’ve contacted every single MP and MSP from a Unionist party representing a Glasgow seat, asking them to participate. They offered from the very beginning to let “Better Together” co-organise and co-host the debate, which will be chaired by the neutral Electoral Reform Society Scotland.
The only reason that “everyone on the platform is a Yes supporter” is because nobody from the No side is prepared to face the Glasgow public and put their case. The opportunity is still there. We confess ourselves perplexed that they seem determined to refuse it, and then to complain bitterly that the debate is one-sided.
We’ve just had a listen to our dear old pal Duncan Hothersall, who gamely appeared on Aye Right Radio this week to attempt to explain/defend Labour’s stillborn “Devo Nano” proposals. He wasn’t able to shed a lot of light on them, but in fairness we suspect that’s more down to the tangled, incoherent, illogical state of the proposals themselves rather than any shortfall of ability, so we’ll move on.
Indeed, the discussion raised more questions than it provided answers, and we’ve made a short list of some of them which Scotland’s journalists might want to crib from the next time they’ve got Johann Lamont or Anas Sarwar in front of a microphone.
It was good to see our old pal, prolific Labour and “Better Together” activist Duncan Hothersall, welcoming the chance for everyone to learn from mistakes yesterday with regard to giving out people’s personal information on the internet.
Of course, Roseanna Cunningham only revealed contact info that was already in the public domain and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, and which had been widely sent out by the person concerned in a spray of unsolicited begging letters. It’d be much worse to give out contact information that was previously unknown and was only sent to one person in a private email, right?
We take our hats off to the No campaigners who braved a cold, dark Scottish morning to go and hand out leaflets to the public at train stations across the country today.
We’d have preferred it if they were distributing leaflets that weren’t packed with a litany of flat-out lies, of course, but we suppose you can’t have everything.
We haven’t done a “We said, he said” argument transcript for months and months, because as a rule they’re of extremely limited interest to anyone outside the political nerdosphere who isn’t familiar with the people involved.
But you don’t need any background to follow this one. So buckle up and do your best to wade past the obvious personal antagonism, because you won’t get a better illustration of the tortured mental twisting and squirming of the No campaign this year.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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