Wings Over Scotland

EXCLUSIVE! Keen-eyed viewers will have noted that our shadowy agents buried deep in the heart of the No camp have already managed to bring you two sneak previews of the Better Together" campaign posters which will soon be appearing on lamp-posts, walls and billboards all across Scotland to explain the benefits of unity. We're delighted to reveal today that they've smuggled several more out of No HQ under cover of darkness, enabling us to help you be prepared for the debate. Here's the first.

More on the way throughout the day.

Inverness Caley Thistle, Aberdeen and St Johnstone join Hearts, Hibs and Dundee United in announcing their intention to vote “No to newco”. Police launch criminal investigation into Craig Whyte’s purchase of the club. Steven Whittaker and Steven Naismith walk away, following Sone Aluko and Rhys McCabe. Reports from the well-informed Alex Thomson of Channel 4 that Charles Green’s consortium is in financial trouble and looking to sell off Sevco 5088 aka the newco Rangers, amid ongoing doubts and speculation about their banking provisions.

And that’s just in the last 24 hours. What’s coming tomorrow?

Attentive readers will know that here at Wings Over Scotland we’ve been exhaustively detailing the 32-year trailer campaign for the fabled “positive case for the Union“. Well, despite our cynicism it’s finally here – the “Better Together” website, launched today, has a whole page devoted to describing the positive case (or as they’d have it, the “+ve” case, which the page URL mischievously translates to “-ve”) in detail.

Stand by to be blown away.

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Can anyone help reconcile these two facts for us?

“Seventy-one per cent of people trust the Scottish Government to act in Scotland’s best interests (up from 61 per cent in 2010), compared to just 18 per cent who trust the UK Government (down from 35 per cent in 2007).“

“The number of people prepared to support Scottish independence is falling substantially, new polling suggests. A Mori Scotland poll found just 35% said they would vote ‘yes’ to independence north of the border, compared to 55% saying ‘no’.“

It’s not a rhetorical question. We don’t get it.

After last weekend’s bizarre time-travelling “exclusive”, this weekend’s Sunday Herald has thrown up another little curiosity. A story in the lead section of the paper’s website today trumpets the latest positive argument from the Unionist camp – that mortgage rates will soar in an independent Scotland, as alleged by Danny Alexander.

The piece, penned by Tom Gordon, is headlined accordingly – “Alexander claims: yes to independence could mean mortgage rise”. What’s interesting, though, is a little piece of text that seems to have been left in by accident at the bottom of the page.

It appears to be a discarded alternative headline for the same article, given that the fourth paragraph cites “the SNP Government” dismissing Alexander’s claims as scare stories. (We did check by Googling to see if the headline had appeared on a completely different Herald piece, but turned up nothing.)

It’s quite instructive to see the paper’s thought processes laid bare. “Scottish Government Slam Scare Tactics” is a positive message from the SNP’s point of view, as it would portray them standing up against Unionist fearmongering.

The headline used instead is the complete opposite – it actually IS Unionist fearmongering, designed to produce an instinctively frightened reaction in the reader, by planting in his/her mind the image of a crippling rise in the cost of living and associating it with a Yes vote (no matter what the feature then goes on to say).

We just thought we’d point it out.

In case you’re joining us late, the most-read WingsLand posts of the last seven days.

URGENT: HELP NEEDED
Labour savages opposition for not speaking out against Labour government.

Storm weathered, minor damage
Opinion poll surprises no-one.

(Don’t) stand by me
Labour MSP Michael McMahon backs hastily away from a lie at FMQs.

No-one here gets out alive
Why Rangers really are doomed this time.

The time machine
The Herald bizarrely repeats a six-month-old story as a new “exclusive”.

Let’s just get this straight
Is everyone in the SPL going to boycott everyone else next season?

A quick quiz
The Unionists’ latest attempt to rig the referendum.

The SPL’s real suicide pact
How Rangers fans might be the ones who kill their own club.

The difference between words and talking
Guest piece by Sue Lyons on the need for honest debate.

Lamont uncertain about uncertainty
Labour “leader” fails to follow her script.

The pendulum set to determine the presence or otherwise of Sevco Rangers in next season’s Scottish Premier League, which earlier in the week appeared to be conclusively stuck on the “No” side of the clock, seems to have swung back at least partially in favour of the Ibrox club in the last 48 hours.

First of all Aberdeen chairman Stewart Milne refuted an apparent suggestion that the club were certain to vote No to Charles Green’s application for the old club’s SPL share, and now Motherwell have released a document painting a dire picture of the Fir Park side’s prospects without Rangers in the top division, going so far as to threaten the possibility of insolvency, in advance of the Well Society’s decision about their vote.

The document, compiled by the Motherwell board, does contain some balancing views (noting, for example, the possibility of a boycott by both home and away fans in the event of voting Yes, which would damage revenues in that scenario too), but seems tilted in favour of persuading the Society to accept Sevco Rangers’ application. And that’s odd, because of all the “Other 10” SPL members outside the Old Firm, Motherwell are the ones best placed to gain massively from the absence of Rangers – a fact the document surprisingly fails to explore.

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For weeks now, if not months, the independence community has been bombarded with claims from Unionists that it’s not independence if you have a shared currency, cooperate on defence, keep the monarchy, share embassies or empower others to act on your behalf. There’s been a continuing drone to the effect that if you don’t do everything personally then you’re not independent.

This view, as any student of English will tell you, is flawed – doing everything for yourself is not independence, but rather self-reliance.

Self-reliance – Not requiring help or support from others while acting autonomously. Self-reliance is relative freedom from needing to rely on others for help with instrumental or task-oriented activities and is distinguished from independence as the latter is a pre-requisite to self-reliance and not predicated on its existence.

In other words, you need independence to act autonomously and to choose to be self-reliant, if you so wish. Yet it would seem, having watched various Unionist politicians and commentators struggle with the concept of independence, that it is necessary to provide a definition that can be easily understood. So I’ll have a go.

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Can you spot what’s strange about this statement, viewers?

“We believe that the process of setting a single question should be taken out of the hands of elected politicians and given to relevant experts the public can have faith in.”

It comes from the mouth of Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont, and forms part of her latest demand – along with her two partners in the Unionist coalition – that the Scottish Government should allow the defeated opposition parties to dictate the terms and conditions of the implementation of the flagship policy behind which it was so resoundingly and unprecedentedly elected a little over a year ago.

(Note in particular the sneaky way the overt demand also slips in a covert demand.)

We’re pretty sure that a general election is already, pretty much by definition, the primary means by which the public expresses who it does and doesn’t “have faith in”. We have, on the other hand, absolutely no way of knowing how much faith that same public does or doesn’t have in the ironically-unelected Electoral Commission, which is appointed by – who’d have guessed it? – the UK Parliament. And just by the by, below are a couple of other relevant snippets from the Commission’s Wikipedia entry:

“The Electoral Commission has a number of responsibilities in relation to referendums. These include:

• commenting on the wording of the referendum question (the government is responsible for proposing the wording)

The Commission has no legal position in the legislation concerning referendums proposed by the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations.”

Our emphasis, there. So, and we admit this is just a crazy madcap idea we’re putting out there, maybe the business of government should properly be conducted by the people the electorate have democratically chosen to do the job, no?

…is seeing Scotland taking its place in peace alongside the other independent nations of the world (at 2m 42s), courtesy of the heartwarming and ever-splendid Dancing Matt:

(Where The Hell Is Matt? 2008 is still our favourite, though.)

And so the phoney war rumbles on and gathers pace. The ‘No’ campaign – or whatever it decides to refer to itself as – will be unveiled shortly and we’ve heard (with a certain sense of deja vu) that the SNP has been debating the relative merits of the words “independenT” and “independenCE”. We have independence and Unionist groups galore appearing on Facebook and the web, we’ve got Cybernats and Britnats, republicans and monarchists, hawks and pacifists and goodness knows what else.

In the meantime, I still have the bills to pay, the washing to dry in the incessant rain, the mundane monotony of the “what’s for dinner?” conversations. Today a friend’s daughter is having a baby, while another lady I know has lost her best friend. The neverending cycle of joy and tears, grief and laughter rolls on.

Politicians would do well to stop and think about this – that away from Parliaments ordinary people are still living their everyday lives, and when we occasionally get to lift our noses from the grindstone we might appreciate a little passion from our politicians, a little honesty, some better research, and an end to the sniping and spin that threatens to suffocate the independence debate.

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