Wings Over Scotland

[This piece was originally titled "Why Piracy Is Good" when I wrote it in August of 2004. I figured I'd make it gratuitously offensive clickbait this time, just for teh funz. If you don't understand the new title, start here.]

It's weird how the simplest games can have the longest stories. Today we're going to talk (well, I'm going to, anyway) about a couple of games (well, four games, but we'll get to that) that are about as Zen-basic as it's possible for electronic entertainment to be.

They're a pair of games which could be played by the one-armed dishwasher from Robin's Nest (one for the mums and dads, there), a duo that require all the brainpower of a starving dog pondering the best course of action to take with a pound of sausages that's just fallen out of an old lady's shopping bag right under his nose.

And yet, by the time we're done we'll have covered inspiration, plagiarism, moral flexibility, flagrant copyright infringement, public-spiritedness, cultural history, corporate pragmatism, collective short-sightedness and the proudest moment in your correspondent's career to date. Which is a lot of stuff, so let's get on or we'll be here all day.

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Scottish Government proposals for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £1,250,000
NO side: £1,500,000
(advantage of £250,000 to NO campaign)

Electoral Commission recommendations for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £2,994,000
NO side: £2,931,000
(advantage of £63,000 to YES campaign)

Oh no! It’s another defeat for the SNP!

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And as we’re talking about money, we couldn’t resist this one.

“Pro-independence parties will be able to spend £1.494m compared with £1.4m for the pro-UK parties, an advantage of £63,000.”

Keep up the good work, chaps.

We’ve already offered our opinion on the Electoral Commission’s report on the question for the independence referendum. The Commission also made two other main recommendations: that both sides should provide information on the consequences of their preferred outcome (something the Unionist side has steadfastly refused to do until now), and that the campaign spending limits should be higher than the Scottish Government’s proposed figures, at £1.5m per side for politicial parties, and the same for other organisations – a total of up to £6m.

The former will be intriguing to watch, but for now let’s talk quickly about the money.

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You can download the Commission’s full report on the question here.

This is the referendum question the Scottish Government wanted:

“Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? YES/NO”

This is the referendum question the Unionist parties wanted:

“Voters should be presented with a statement on the ballot paper: ‘Scotland should become an independent state’, and asked to put an ‘X’ against ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’.”

This, we’re told today, is what the referendum question will be:

“Should Scotland be an independent country? YES/NO”

Yep, sounds like another “comprehensive defeat” for the SNP all right.

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Chris Cairns on the price of dignity.

At least the price is falling this time round, we suppose.

Click for teh bigs. You know where it’s from by now, right?

Dear Mr Benn,

I was in Glasgow Concert Hall on Saturday for your interview, and the preview of the film about your life. And what a life! You are inspirational to many, as the crowd made clear. It’s easy to see why. You talk passionately of hope, of belief in a better future, of anger at injustice. Of engagement and democracy.

You recognise, too, that New Labour became right-wing, almost a second Tory party. You must understand how this played in Scotland.

It’s for these reasons I was depressed and perplexed by your answer to the question on Scottish independence. The question was a good one: would an independent Scotland be more socialist? It’s a question many in the independence movement grapple with. Can we cast off Westminster’s neoliberalism, corruption and corporate greed? There is no answer; no one knows.

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Just a quick bit of infrastructure, folks. We’ve been meaning for a while to get round to sorting out proper author tags, as the WordPress theme the site uses annoyingly doesn’t link from bylines. However, as the sidebar “tag cloud” isn’t big enough to include all our tags at once, even that didn’t quite do the job.

So now in the black tab bar at the top of the screen there’s a handy Contributors page, from which you can immediately and easily locate articles by your favourite WingsLand writers who aren’t me. Want to feature in it? We want to hear from you.

There’s a small but quite vocal subset of opinion among followers of Scottish politics that David Cameron and the Tories are doing their damnedest to “throw” the independence referendum. A string of implausibly clumsy interventions starting with the Prime Minister’s attempt to lay down the law of a year ago have led to growing speculation that the Conservatives would in fact be somewhere beyond delighted to see Scotland go its own way, but simply can’t be seen to be saying so.

It’s an argument that has a lot of rational weight. Scotland hasn’t returned more than one Conservative MP since 1992, and seems unlikely to change that statistic any time soon, effectively giving the Tories a handicap of 50+ seats in every general election. There’s now little remaining dispute that the balance of Scottish revenue/expenditure at the Treasury is basically neutral, so there’s no great financial blow to be endured if the Scots make off with the remainder of North Sea oil.

(And even senior Scottish Tories think that the sort of complete break with the toxic Conservative brand which would accompany independence is the only hope of ever reviving their fortunes north of the border.)

Are we really meant to believe, then, that Cameron’s party is unbreakably committed to keeping a pathologically ungrateful Scotland in the Union for purely sentimental reasons? Pull the other one, readers – it’s got bells on.

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Because sometimes the story at the end of the news is just a nice feelgood one.

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