The Hunt for Moldywarp : A Buzz round the Media with Honey McBee

So, back again to our very own conscious uncoupling, though in truth we need no longer worry about the remaining months, since Kenneth Roy, like Nostradamus, already knows the outcome and shared it with us in last week’s Scottish Review. Plus ca change? Possibly…

Read no further you may think, but alas, the world is still turning. It’ll be turning upside down for one man [bound to be, sisters], if a furious No 10 catches the mole [OE mouldywarp or Moldywarp for Alison Uttley devotees] responsible for surfacing with the story of the week by Nicholas Watt in Saturday’s Guardian.

THE HUNT FOR MOULDYWARP…

The mole - an unnamed minister ‘at the heart of the pro-union campaign’ – was foolish enough to reveal that of course iScotland could enter into a currency union with rUK, and hints that it would be a quid-pro-quo for keeping the nuclear bases in Scottish waters. You can see, said the unnamed minister, the outline of a deal - "You simply cannot imagine Westminster abandoning the people of Scotland. Saying no to a currency union is obviously a vital part of the no campaign. But everything would change in the negotiations if there were a yes vote."   It is, of course, all manna for the SNP.

According to a YouGov poll, 45% of us believe Osborne and Co. were bluffing in the first place, and this confirms our suspicions. And it gets worse for Better Together.  “Westminster's emphatic [currency union]rejection”, says Watt in his article “was taken on the specific advice of the former chancellor and Better Together chief, Alistair Darling, and the main Downing Street Scottish adviser, Andrew Dunlop. The Treasury had assumed that Osborne would stick to his position of saying that a currency union would be highly unlikely. The decision to toughen up the message was made because Darling believes Better Together needs to do more than win the referendum – it needs to kill off independence with an emphatic win. "Alistair and Andrew are running the show – we just did what they said," one Treasury source said.”

Iain Martin in the Sunday Telegraph says the leak is crucial for the pro-union side – “What makes the intervention important, and what elevates it above the standard squabbling of Scottish politicians, is that it damages the central plank of the pro-Union Better Together operation just at the moment when the campaign is already under intense pressure from Mr Salmond. Some on the pro-Union side are starting to fear that the race – which could lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom – could be tighter than they once thought. And it enables those running the Yes campaign to tell voters that anti-nationalist warnings are bogus.”

And so the mole-hunt begins. We know it wasn’t Philip Hammond, because he told the BBC. Alan Roden in yesterday’s Daily Mail confidently predicted that once found, the miscreant will be served up as a kebab for George Osborne. But it isn’t just No. 10 on the trail –Roden quotes a ‘senior Labour Party source’ as saying “they have a duty to find this person, explain that they don't speak for the Government and then put them up against a wall and shoot them. There is no bluff or bluster”

In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, Alan Cochrane called the leak “nothing short of stinking treachery”. Mr Cochrane thinks Better Together should pull itself together; on Saturday he called for Charles Kennedy to enter the fray, yesterday he was pleading for Alistair Darling to be put solely in charge instead of operating a ‘campaign-by-committee’.  All Unionists must, he says, wake up - “put a UK sticker in your car, shove leaflets through some letter-boxes, man a stall at the shopping centre. Do something!”

For Alan, the loquacious George Galloway is ‘showing the way’ with his Just Say Naw tour. Indeed, if you’re feeling strong, you can watch Mr Galloway in action in Glenrothes - and enjoying a fish supper - in this Guardian video.

Lesley Riddoch in yesterday’s Scotsman said Galloway is as deeply loathed by Labour as the Nationalists and questions whether Tavish Scott’s weekend call for the unionist ‘big beasts’– Gordon Brown, John Reid and George Robertson -  to come out in full cry, will have any resonance with voters. Older people, she says, take their views from ‘top-down’ figures of authority. Not so the under-50s, who choose from a variety of views the ones that best reflect their own.

Robin McAlpine (director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, so not exactly neutral on the subject) dissected the current and past woes of Better Together’s campaigning for yesterday’s Bella Caledonia.  McAlpine’s analysis is interesting.  Iain McWhirter in the Sunday Herald this week wrote about the new confidence in the Yes campaign, but McAlpine issues a stark warning to Yes Scotland that it cannot sit back because the opposition appears to be falling apart – “Nobody ever wins by default. Nobody”

BEST OF THE INDYREF REST…

Academic online website The Conversation has assembled a panel of experts to comment on Indyref issues over the coming months.  The first contribution is on the currency debate, which for those of us living through it, is probably a bit New Readers, start here, as is this on the nature of referendums in Europe.  However, the article on the high number of graduates in Edinburgh and Glasgow is interesting, as is that from Prof Curtice on the dark arts of polling.  On the subject of graduates, David Leask in yesterday’s Herald revealed that alumni from Glasgow University now dominate Scottish politics. A quarter of MSPs have, in one capacity or another, studied at Glasgow, which compares with the 24% of Westminster MPs who attended Oxbridge.

We’ve heard the concerns of big business over the prospect of independence – now it’s the turn of Scotland’s small businesses to express disquiet. Scott Macnab in yesterday’s Scotsman reported on a new survey from Ingenious Britain, which found that 48% thought iScotland would be bad for their business against 37% who thought it would be a positive move. According to the survey, 90% have already made up their mind which way they’ll vote…  This presumably includes Bill Munro of Barrhead Travel, who is now, according to Stephen Emerson in the Scotsman, getting flak for a company-wide email he sent last month declaring independence would be a disaster

For the potential referendum within a referendum, Duncan McLean in last Tuesday’s Guardian  looked at the Declaration of Wyre. No, it’s not some medieval parchment, it’s a 30-yr old supplication from Orcadians and Shetlanders worried about the threatened expansion of Dounreay nuclear power station, seeking intervention with Westminster by the royal houses of Norway and Denmark. The question of who the islands belong to, says McLean, has never been decisively resolved; are calls for a referendum on further autonomy just an attempt by Better Together to stir things? If so, he warns, be careful what you wish for…

Ruth Wishart took to the Observer this week to explain, patiently, to its southern readers that Scotland is already another country and we do indeed do things differently here.  Westminster’s parade of day trippers, she said, fails to grasp that devolution “is not a destination but a process – you know things are serious when John Major is being winkled out to embark on a tartan charm offensive.”   Her sentiments are echoed by Roger Cohen in the New York Times.  Cohen says the real question for the UK is not whether Scotland should break away, but should London?  The impression the rest of the country has, says Cohen, is that London is an island to itself, and this feeling is stronger nowhere than in Scotland…

WHAT’S THE WORLD COMING TO?

Shock, horror in Morningside!  It was bad enough when House of Fraser took over Jenners, the pride of Princes Street.  The news in yesterday’s Daily Mail and the Sunday Times [£] that Sanpower, a Chinese conglomerate, is bidding for HoF will surely give Edinburgh’s blue-rinse brigade the vapours.  The chain has been looking for a buyer for some time – at one time Galeries Lafayette - a French equivalent of Jenners - was in the running, but fell by the wayside.  The McCarthy family have already accepted Sanpower’s offer - now it’s down to the Icelandic banks and Sir Tom Hunter. Watch this space…

COUGHS AND SNEEZES...

Skip this if you’re having breakfast. The black rat has had a bad press down the centuries. Indeed, apart from the Nigel Molesworths of the world, it probably still does. So it’ll come as a welcome relief to the little furries that they are no longer held responsible for the Black Death. As Vanessa Thorpe explained in the Observer, the Black Death arrived in England from Asia in Autumn 1348 and by Spring 1349 had killed six out of ten Londoners. The teeth of skulls excavated in the process of building London’s Crossrail have been examined, and experts now conclude that the plague must have been airborne – pneumonic rather than bubonic - because of the speed with which it wiped people out. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases…

SHEEP MAY NO LONGER SAFELY GRAZE

Rosemary Goring in yesterday’s Herald laments the potential loss of hill sheep farming in favour of forestry.  Chainsaws, she says, could soon replace the bleating of new-born lambs as farmers in Eskdalemuir are advised, in a report from the Scottish Agricultural College, that growing conifers is more productive, more sustainable, and far less reliant on public subsidy than sheep farming.

Conifers, says Goring, produce three times the profit and require only one-sixth of the subsidy of sheep, but she questions the claims that they improve the environment – “Ask a sheep farmer about the benefits of sheep cropping for wildlife preservation and proliferation, and he will be able to talk until the cows come home. It all depends on what one wants preserved or enhanced.

Like cattle, sheep are a vital part of our heritage, and there is something reassuring about the sight and sound of them in our fields. Like the first snowdrops or daffodils, they are a sign of renewal, even though we know most of them will soon be turned into chops. They have spiritual significance too, as Easter approaches and the lamb's biblical symbolism takes on added meaning… Farming has always had it seasons, but one would be saddened if sheep have had their day.”  Indeed.

AND FINALLY…

No, no furry animals this week – just a wee lament at another vanishing world. While at Scot-Buzz we normally embrace new technology (some, we must admit, with caution!), when it comes to Sat-Nav versus good old-fashioned maps, we’re fiercely in the Luddite camp. So we were saddened by the news in the Sunday Telegraph that the Ordnance Survey is planning to end routinely producing paper maps covering the UK.

So we'll no longer  be able to walk into Waterstones or Blackwells and browse through the selection on offer. Instead we’ll have to order the ones we want. In the face of declining sales - in favour presumably of the irritating voice that harangues you to turn left and takes lorries down narrow country lanes – it makes commercial sense, but will deprive some of us of the sense of adventure the map department provides.

We would get out more – if only we had the map…