Wings Over Scotland

Readers might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu on watching last night's Newsnight Scotland, which featured a rather animated interview with Alistair Darling. Because not for the first time, the No campaign chief seemed to be experiencing a considerable amount of difficulty in getting his story straight.

Let's examine a couple of intriguing snippets.

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February 2012: “Don’t worry, Scotland – the Olympics might be costing you millions of pounds, but look at all the extra tourism you’ll be getting from it to compensate!”

What could possibly go wrong? Bring on the bonanza!

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We’ve already tweeted about this and it’s doing the rounds in general, but as we know lots of you don’t use Twitter we’re just going to give it another little nudge.

We’re enormously jealous of Bella Caledonia today as they have a fantastic exclusive piece by “Trainspotting” author Irvine Welsh, entitled “Scottish Independence And British Unity”. It’s of particular interest from our perspective as it tells of Welsh’s experiences of spending large amounts of time in both Scotland and England, and his conclusions are both perceptive and compelling.

It’s a lengthy read at 5000+ words, but it’s worth every second. Check it out here.

(Mind you, we’d have caught the typos…)

We’ve closed two comment threads today, both of them coincidentally at the 250-comment mark, which we think is the highest ever. Both had descended into pointlessness, with small groups repeating themselves at each other and everyone complaining that everyone else was being rude. By internet argument standards they were very mild indeed, but it seemed a good time to reiterate our moderation policy.

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We had a conversation on Twitter with a fan of The Rangers this evening (though he was terribly upset at the use of the term for some reason). It was sparked by Charles Green’s latest piece of box-office wizardry, in which he gave an interview – watchable for just 99p on the club’s website – professing his fury at the Ibrox side’s apparent exclusion from league reconstruction talks and vowing to remove Rangers International Football Club PLC from Scottish football at the first available opportunity.

And on the face of it, Green has a legitimate complaint. Rule 19 (above) of the SFL Constitution expressly notes that Associate Members such as TRFC are entitled to “attend and speak at” any meeting of the League, though not to vote, and according to Green his club have in fact been completely ignored in the discussions. But beyond that, it’s extremely hard to actually work out what his beef is.

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A short time ago we received an angry message from someone purporting to be a representative of the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign. It read as follows:

Dear Sir,

“Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going”

I presume you have a link to back that up? It’s absolutely, 100% certain it won’t and can’t go to Mars? Have you taken legal advice, and if so was that general or specific advice, and was the legal adviser a Martian or a universe expert on Martian law?

Perhaps Trident will stay and Scotland in its entirety may have to be sent to Mars! Have you considered that, huh? Huh? No I bet not because you stupid separatist Yes types have never considered these kinds of questions, despite having over 300 years to do it!”

Yours,
Bet R. Together (Mrs),
BRITAIN, THE BRITISH EMPIRE

Wings Over Scotland would like to take this opportunity to retract our earlier assertion. It is entirely possible that either Trident or all of Scotland might be transported to Mars – a situation which would unquestionably result in the safeguarding of thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs, and a much-needed end to the disastrous fear, doubt and uncertainty being experienced by businesses both in Scotland and on the Red Planet.

Such a prospect is, indeed, at least as plausible as that of a UK government granting the Scottish Parliament extra powers in the event of a No vote. We apologise if we have misled readers in any way. Thank you for your attention.

Wait, sorry. We got confused. As far as we can establish from some recent official statements by the UK Government, the No campaign and the media, Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going if Scotland votes for independence. Let’s have a quick recap on where we’re up to.

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You can click to make the picture bigger, if you can’t already see the big picture.

Four Lib Dems. Fucking FOUR. Fuck all of you. Really. Just fucking die.

I’m a fairly placid chap, readers. I really am. I’ve been around a bit, seen a few things. It takes a lot to raise my blood pressure. You’ve been reading this site for over a year and you know the only thing that’s really got under my skin is Craig sodding Levein.

But tonight I’m just about boiling over with rage. When it came down to it, four Liberal Democrat MPs – including the one I’ve voted for for the last 20 years – rebelled against pretty much the most evil thing any UK government’s done for about a century. Four. They couldn’t even be bothered to try to make it look good.

I’ve already got my most upbeat Spotify playlist running just to stop myself screaming profanities into the night out of the window. I should probably delete the last hour’s tweets. (But won’t.) So post cute pictures of kittens. Tell a few jokes or heartwarming stories. Anything, anything at all that’s nice and beautiful and good and suggests maybe this entire country isn’t just a stinking, rancid sewer full of subhuman scum.

I hate these people so much – these vicious, monstrous Tories, these treacherous Lib Dems, these grubby, cynical Labour hypocrites – that I’m scaring myself a little.

Oh dear, BBC.

That’s a very poor effort at impartiality indeed.

This site’s primary purpose is the provision of facts. We want to persuade people of the merits of independence, but we want to do it with the truth, which is why we have a conspicuous policy of providing links whenever we make factual assertions. That often means criticising other media when it adopts a more lax approach to upholding proper journalistic standards, whether we like that media or not.

Last night’s Scotland Tonight repeatedly made a casual assertion about opinion polls on independence which, as we’ll see in a moment, was simply untrue. We make, and intend, no suggestion that they did so from malice or bias. We’re just pointing out that they got it wrong, so that people will be armed with the correct facts.

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