Wings Over Scotland

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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Readers as alert as this site’s will no doubt have already noticed our latest addition, signified as it is by the rather jarring appearance of a Union Jack over in the central links column – The Sealand Gazette. It’s a Scoopit news-aggregator like Peter Bell’s fine Referendum 2014 (and others), but with a rather different theme.

The Gazette, simply put, records the many reasons why Scotland can no longer afford to stay in the Union. It was founded back in June 2012, then neglected for a bit, then taken up again, and then we belatedly realised that it had a greater relevance than its original purpose and gave it a bit of a brush-up.

If you ever forget what we’re fighting for (or against), it’ll remind you.

We don’t look at British political cartoons very much, mainly because we can’t think of a consistently good one. It seems to be a lost art since the long-gone days of Angus Og, devoted less to cutting insightful and acutely-observed satirical commentary than to the altogether baser pursuit of grotesque caricature.

Even the Guardian’s much-vaunted Steve Bell leaves us stone-cold 99% of the time, and often desperately scouring the news pages to work out what the joke is supposed to be about, let alone whether it’s funny. (He’s been drawing David Cameron with a condom on his head for a fair few years now, and we still have no idea why.)

But half-awake this morning, we clicked on a link in a tweet that led us to The Scotsman’s latest effort, and it’s a sort of masterpiece, in much the same sense that while murder is a terrible thing, Harold Shipman was undeniably really good at it.

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It’s commonplace for professional journalists these days to dismiss bloggers and social-media users as “internet bampots” – frothing, furious, abusive lunatics ranting at parked cars. But in fairness, some do tend to get a bit over-excited from time to time.

By way of example, let’s check out a couple of the wilder-eyed nationalists who’ve been allowed out by the nurses to air their rage in public this week.

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We guess you’d have to call the 1979 referendum leaflet on the left the whole-ish truth.

(Yep, we’re still mining the Scottish Political Archive. It’s a rich seam.)

Readers may recall that a few days ago we highlighted a rather bizarre confusion on the part of the anti-independence movement, which is more commonly known as “Better Whenever” or something like that. Faced with a poll in which 11% of respondents wished to completely abolish the Scottish Parliament and end the devolution experiment, the No campaign decided that such people were in fact “supporters of devolution” and tailored their promotional materials accordingly.

We think we may have solved this baffling puzzle, however, and the key was in a Twitter message posted earlier today by the campaign’s director Blair McDougall.

Unaccountably, Mr McDougall appeared to be under the impression than the SNP had “opposed” devolution in the 1990s. (And presumbly most pertinently around the time of the 1997 referendum on the subject.) That didn’t quite seem to square with our, in fairness, increasingly-fallible memory of the period, so we did a little research.

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If you raise the slightest voice of dissent to the increasing fetishisation of the military in the UK these days, you risk drawing down a barrage of foul-mouthed ire on your head from furious British nationalists, inexplicably enraged at the expression of the desire not to send the sons, daughters, friends, fathers and mothers of Scotland off to die pointlessly in foreign countries where we have no legitimate business.

So it was nice to have our comments about the crass, jingoistic “commemoration” of last year’s Remembrance Day circus at Ibrox echoed this week by the joint chiefs of Scotland’s armed forces, who have ordered that the grotesque, “inappropriate” scenes will not be repeated in future. We hope the club’s fans, and others of the same mindset, will pay more attention when rebuked by such impeccable authorities than they ever would to the objections of evil traitorous cybernats like us.

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There wouldn’t be many people left in the No campaign if these were the rules.

So remember, folks – calling someone a Nazi isn’t political debate. Nazis weren’t comical figures of fun. That sort of poison is “sick abuse and gutter politics”, and must be stamped on if we’re ever to raise the level of debate.

(Another nugget from the Scottish Political Archive.)

We know for certain that a good many Scottish newspaper and broadcast journalists read this website, so maybe one of them will enlighten us about something. The latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report contained a wealth of tables and statistics in respect of the independence debate, but the entire media seized, with complete and startling uniformity, on one in particular.

It was a curious choice to highlight, as it related to a vaguely-worded, ambiguous question with no relevance to the options which voters will actually choose between in the referendum. Yet the very same survey contained a much more interesting set of results which got either a dismissive passing mention or no coverage at all.

Since, as we’ve already established, there’s no Grand Unionist Black-Ops Society which meets in Pacific Quay to decide how best to serve the grim needs of the No campaign, we’d honestly like to know how not one single newspaper, TV channel or radio station thought this particular question merited lead status in their coverage of the SSAS. Because it presents a radically different picture of Scottish opinion to the one absolutely everyone decided, by miraculous coincidence, to paint.

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It’s a real bonus for us when other people dissect something so comprehensively, from a variety of angles, that we don’t have to bother. The solitary piece of what could conceivably be described as solid content in Ruth Davidson’s speech in Edinburgh yesterday appeared to comprise a well-known football chant, which we’ll paraphrase for sensitive readers: “We’re [not of a very high standard], and we know we are”.

Fortunately, we’ve been saved some time in pulling it apart in detail thanks to three excellent and forensic examinations by the unlikely trinity of Lallands Peat Worrier, Alex Massie in the Spectator  and – heavens above – Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph.  We’re off now to check our temperature and make sure we don’t have a fever.

As we’ve noted before, media bias is a subtle beast. It doesn’t (we think) take the form of dastardly late-night meetings where BBC or Scotsman editors gather to plot the next day’s subversion of the Yes campaign. Much of it comprises things journalists often aren’t even consciously aware they’re doing, as documented by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their remarkable book “Manufacturing Consent”.

(We’ve appended a footnote below this piece by Douglas Daniel, summarising a few of the book’s core principles as they can be applied to the independence debate.)

Let’s be uncharacteristically charitable, then, and assume honest intentions when we examine an interesting piece by Magnus Gardham in the Herald today, which goes by the headline “PM’s Euro gamble has strengthened SNP’s hand”.

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