Our future is in safe hands with Gavin Pearson

As we all know, budding DJs are required to take a degree in Un-Self-Awareness at the University of Foot-In-Mouth, and I'm delighted to say that all those years of hard work have paid off handsomely for Gavin Pearson of Clyde 1. Earlier today, he hosted a live music stage at the Merchant City Festival, and between acts handed out tickets to other events at the festival to people who answered quiz questions "correctly". You're way ahead of me here - "correctly" is in inverted commas for a reason.

Question 1 was : "What is the capital city of Brazil?" The surprisingly knowledgeable audience shouted out "Brasilia!" in near-unison. But Pearson didn't seem terribly impressed, muttering "nope, doesn't sound right". He turned to the teenage girls near the front (they were there to see the boyband Supernova), and said "help them out here, tell them what the capital of Brazil is". One of them offered "Mongolia" as a suggestion, at which point Pearson rolled his eyes and said "our future is clearly in safe hands, ladies and gentlemen".

"Come on," he implored, "surely someone here knows what the capital of Brazil is!" A voice at the back suggested Rio de Janeiro, which Pearson jubilantly seized upon by saying "Thankyou! At last! Yes, the capital city of Brazil is Rio de Janeiro. Here, come and collect your prize." At which point, quite literally the only member of the audience over the age of 18 who didn't know that Brasilia is the capital city of Brazil was deservedly rewarded for his ignorance with some free tickets. Naturally there were quite a few cries of "No it isn't!" and "You're wrong!", which Pearson was seemingly oblivious to. (And if only I had used the zoom function in the above photo, you'd have been able to see a look of utter disbelief on the face of one of the musicians behind him.)

Twenty minutes later, Pearson was back for more. "OK, as you're all so rubbish at geography and don't even know where Rio is, I'll try a different topic. Now don't call out this time, just put your hand up when you know the answer."

"Brasilia!" shouted a wag at the back.

More evidence that Labour is heading for defeat

Although YouGov have yet to match ICM by producing a poll showing the Tories level-pegging with Labour, the latest one does show Labour's lead down to a wafer-thin three points. More significantly, we're provided with a breakdown of where voters for the three main London parties in 2010 have gone to since. This offers a particularly useful insight into what type of people are currently in the UKIP column. Really the only surprise here is that there are no surprises at all -

15% of people who voted Conservative in 2010 now support UKIP.

6% of people who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 now support UKIP.

4% of people who voted Labour in 2010 now support UKIP.

So the conventional wisdom is borne out by this poll - if we can assume that perhaps half of current UKIP supporters will drift back "home" to their previous party by the time of the general election (a reasonable assumption unless Farage is given a place in any TV leaders' debates that may take place), then Labour no longer have a lead in any meaningful sense.

Incidentally, there's no reason to imagine that switchers from Conservative to UKIP are so scunnered with their former party that they're more likely to go the whole hog and vote Labour rather than return to the Tory fold. This poll actually shows that the Conservatives have more 2010 Labour voters in their column at present than Labour have 2010 Tory voters. In spite of his relentless march to the right, Miliband seems to be utterly failing to appeal to former Tory supporters - his slim lead is an artificial product of the UKIP advance and the Lib Dem collapse.

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Simply because I'm so impressed that someone actually sent me a personal tweet to promote their Edinburgh Fringe show, I may as well give it a quick plug. It looks quite intriguing - it's called The Confessions of Gordon Brown.

"Gordon Brown hilariously exposes the darkest secrets of being Prime Minister, the stab-in-the-back plotting, the betrayals and most importantly - the hair gel. Love him or loathe him, Gordon candidly reveals what it takes to knife your way to the top and rule a nation. And how his dream of power all went wrong. New play by acclaimed Scots Emmy-nominated writer and director Kevin Toolis in a manyrivers production."

This is something that happens nowhere else in the world

Spotted at the BBC's "live blog of the royal baby celebrations" (give me strength) -

"As a British expat living in East Germany and married to a Ukrainian I couldn't feel more proud and happy to be British right now!"

Yeah, 'cos we Brits can actually deliver a baby. Take that, East Germany and Ukraine!

Congratulations, Mrs Windsor, it's a head of state!

By a rough extrapolation, Kate Middleton's son was just one of the 5000 or so babies born yesterday in the sixteen Commonwealth Realms that share the same monarchy. For all our sakes, we'd better hope that, by some extraordinary coincidence, he just happens to be better suited to the role of Head of State than all of the rest of those 5000 (not to mention the countless millions that will be born on all the other days between now and his accession to the throne). But it does seem somewhat unlikely.

On the plus side, Gordon Brown can sleep a tad more easily tonight. Apparently one of the twenty-odd things that's been troubling him most about the prospect of independence is that the Scottish Parliament might "take a different view on the line of succession for the monarchy" (although why the Scottish Parliament would be any more likely to do that than the Australian, Jamaican or Barbadian parliaments is something of a mystery). Well, now that males are clearly first in line to the throne for the next three generations regardless of whether they are given constitutional precedence over females, that seems to be yet another of the No campaign's "terrifying" imagined futures that we can safely stop fretting about.

Go get 'em, Tiger! You da man! Get in the HOOOOOLE!

Yup, you've guessed it. Not content with my already impressive credentials as a woman-hater (well, if you believe Edinburgh Eye and Better Nation supremo James Mackenzie), I decided to burnish them still further yesterday by popping along to Muirfield for the first round of the Open. I've never experienced anything like that before (heat in Scotland, I mean) so it was all very exciting.

Not having previously been to a golf tournament, my main concern was that I would unwittingly do something stupid or wrong and find myself being bawled out in Monty-style by a player, caddie or marshal. That fear wasn't entirely unfounded, because I repeatedly thought I was ambling along, minding my own business, only to discover I was actually in the middle of a fairway or on the edge of a green. Most of the time it was impossible to tell who was the unfortunate target of the shrieks of indignation, although on the one occasion that I thought it might well be me, it was (to my eternal shame) a Scottish player I was potentially distracting. Fortunately, Martin Laird recovered his composure sufficiently to put together a below-par round, and I see that he has done well again today. It's probably too much to hope that he's a potential winner, but it's good to know that a Scot can at least still be competitive in majors. Reading his back-story, though, it's slightly sad to find that he's another example of a Scottish sportsman like Andy Murray who had to go abroad at a young age to achieve great things.

There's obviously some logic to the draconian rules that the marshals enforce, but it does lead to an unfortunate fixed setting of "aggressive official". Even the chap who "welcomed" us to the course started by screaming "WE WANT YOU TO ENJOY YOURSELVES TODAY", but thankfully refrained from adding "OR YOU WILL BE EXECUTED". I felt a bit sorry for a Spanish guy with very poor English, who misunderstood an instruction to put his camera away, and found himself being charged up to in nightclub bouncer style by a marshal, who menacingly whispered in his ear : "I appreciate it may be silent, but if you use that everyone else will follow your example, so it needs to go away now". Given the circumstances, I think "do you speak English?" might possibly have borne more fruit than the War and Peace edition of "why cameras are banned".

The only mention I heard of the male-only issue was on the train, when a young Scottish guy asked an Irish woman what she thought of it. "That's golf," she replied. Emboldened, the man complained that "nobody ever says anything about the all-women clubs". Well, yes, but that's probably because the all-women clubs were predominantly founded to compensate for the existence of all-male clubs. If that hadn't been the case, they certainly would be legitimate targets for criticism, just as the bizarre Women's Prize for Fiction is.

As a final thought, the woman added : "I watch women at my own club, most of them don't even know the etiquette, it's an embarrassment". Spurious anecdotal justifications for discriminating against an entire gender - don't you just love them? Typical bloody redhead.

ICM subsample : SNP retain lead in Westminster voting intention

More bad news for the No campaign has arrived in the shape of this month's GB-wide poll of Westminster voting intentions conducted by ICM, regarded by some (but not all) as Britain's most reliable pollster. First of all, the SNP retain a clear lead in the Scottish subsample, suggesting that last month's extraordinary figures were not a fluke -

SNP 40%
Labour 30%
Conservatives 18%
Greens 6%
Liberal Democrats 3%
UKIP 1%
Others 2%

Perhaps even more significant, though, is that the Tories have now drawn level with Labour across Britain as a whole. As we know, Scots are significantly more likely to favour independence if they think that the Tories are heading for victory at the next general election. And on these figures, at a point in mid-term when the main opposition party ought to have a significant lead, there can be very little doubt that the Tories are indeed strong favourites to remain in office after 2015 -

Conservatives 36% (+7)
Labour 36% (-)
Liberal Democrats 13% (+1)
UKIP 7% (-5)
Others 8% (-2)

YouGov poll : Scotland says a resounding no to renewing Trident

Here's another significant blow for journalists who like to peddle the fiction that Scottish public opinion on key issues is near-enough indistinguishable from public opinion in the rest of the UK. YouGov's latest poll on the future of Britain's "minimum nuclear deterrent" (translation : a weapons system that, if used, would extinguish the lives of hundreds of millions of innocent civilians within minutes) shows that Scotland is the only part of the UK where outright abolition is the most popular of the three basic options. Support for that option is also a full fourteen points higher in Scotland than it is across Britain as a whole.

GREAT BRITAIN :

The UK should order four new submarines to maintain its nuclear weapons system - 32%
The UK should try to find a cheaper system for keeping nuclear weapons - 34%
The UK should give up nuclear weapons altogether - 20%

SCOTLAND :

The UK should order four new submarines to maintain its nuclear weapons system - 25%
The UK should try to find a cheaper system for keeping nuclear weapons - 31%
The UK should give up nuclear weapons altogether - 34%

One small consolation for the above-mentioned journalists, though - this doesn't necessarily prove that Scots hold more progressive views in general. It may have just been the effect of living with these inhuman weapons on our doorstep for the last few decades that has brought us to our senses a little quicker than others. Although, to be fair, respondents in both Scotland and the rest of the UK seem thoroughly unconvinced by the argument that the retention of nuclear weapons somehow makes us safer, as opposed to putting us at far greater risk of being the target of a nuclear attack ourselves.

Thinking about nuclear weapons, please say how persuasive, if at all, you find the following statements...

Having nuclear weapons makes the world more dangerous, not less, because we encourage other countries to get them by having them ourselves.

GREAT BRITAIN :

Persuasive 61%
Not Persuasive 25%

SCOTLAND :

Persuasive 62%
Not Persuasive 30%

But unsurprisingly, the marked difference between Scottish and British opinion returns with a vengeance when we move on to the true rationale for retaining Trident - the need for a British national status symbol. (If we simply had to have one of those, couldn't we have done humanity a favour by holding onto Concorde instead?)

If the United Kingdom abandoned its nuclear weapons, then it could be seen as a less important country in the world.

GREAT BRITAIN :

Persuasive 46%
Not Persuasive 38%

SCOTLAND :

Persuasive 36%
Not Persuasive 51%

The United Kingdom doesn't need its own nuclear weapons to have influence because some other countries have a lot of influence without having their own nuclear weapons.

GREAT BRITAIN :

Persuasive 41%
Not Persuasive 42%

SCOTLAND :

Persuasive 54%
Not Persuasive 31%

Just 11% of Scots think Labour have a strong leader

One fairly consistent feature of GB-wide polling is that Labour tend to fare better in supplementary questions among Scottish respondents than they do among respondents elsewhere. For example, Scots are typically more likely to think that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are preferable to Cameron and Osborne as custodians of the economy. But there's precious little sign of that phenomenon in YouGov's latest polling on whether Ed Miliband is a strong or a weak leader. Only one region of GB has a lower proportion of people than Scotland who think that Miliband is a strong leader, and there is no region at all that has a higher proportion of people who think he is weak.

PERCENTAGE WHO THINK ED MILIBAND IS A 'STRONG' LEADER :

London 12%
South excluding London 10%
Wales and English Midlands 14%
North of England 15%
Scotland 11%

PERCENTAGE WHO THINK ED MILIBAND IS A 'WEAK' LEADER :

London 45%
South excluding London 49%
Wales and English Midlands 42%
North of England 45%
Scotland 49%

This matters because the No campaign's hopes rest to a large extent on Labour being perceived as having a genuine chance of winning the next UK general election. Scots who think that the party is led by a weak leader are scarcely likely to be filled with confidence on that score.

UK government proposes military occupation of an independent Scotland. Will anti-nuclear No campaigners speak out against this?

One of the best teachers I ever had was a history teacher at Anniesland College. When he was explaining for us the significance of the West Lothian by-election in 1962 to the fortunes of the SNP, he mentioned that he had been a canvasser in that contest, but had only realised many decades later that he'd been a participant in something of a landmark election. He refused to tell us which party he'd campaigned for, from which I guessed that it probably wasn't the Nationalists. But he did add, when we were discussing what I presumed to be highly implausible 'what if?' scenarios, that he would be prepared to take up arms to defend Scottish independence if necessary, regardless of whether he had voted for it himself.

I hope nobody is thinking of taking up arms tonight, but I suspect there will be a great many potential No voters looking at the front cover of The Guardian, and thinking to themselves "I might be against independence in principle, but up with this I will not put". If you haven't seen the story, it's a suggestion from MoD sources that if Scotland votes for independence (which among other things will be a vote for the removal of nuclear weapons from our shores), the UK government will simply confiscate the part of Scotland which currently hosts nuclear weapons and declare it UK sovereign territory - in precisely the same way that 3% of Cypriot territory was stolen upon independence in 1960 for military convenience, and indefensibly remains under British sovereign control to this very day. Does the word 'arrogance' cover that type of mindset? Does 'cynical' cover it? If all else fails, 'imperial' and 'colonial' will certainly fit the bill, so unless this threat is explicitly withdrawn, let's never again see any smirking when the suggestion is made that London governance over Scotland is quasi-colonial in nature.

I'm sorry, but I'm not campaigning for independence for a country called 'Scotland minus Faslane'. I will not be sanguine about a foreign government occupying a part of our territory, just so that it can retain the ability to inflict a holocaust on foreign peoples that would make what Hitler did to the Jews look like a tea party. Are these really the values of our opponents? That the ability to mass murder hundreds of millions of civilians at the press of a button is so important as a national status symbol that even democracy must be subverted to that end? Can the likes of Kezia Dugdale and Duncan Hothersall look at themselves in the mirror and still support the No campaign when this is what it stands for?

Some of you will have seen the nine 'Think Independence' posters that I put together, and that Tris very kindly posted on Munguin's Republic the other day. What you don't know is that there was a tenth that Tris decided not to use. It showed a real image from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, with a human body lying in the rubble, burned beyond all possible recognition and with limbs missing. The text read "NUCLEAR WEAPONS : COMPULSORY IN SCOTLAND AS PART OF THE UK. THINK INDEPENDENCE". I deliberately set out to shock, because I felt that when people euphemistically use terms like 'minimum nuclear deterrent', they lose sight of the indescribable evil that they're actually talking about. However, Tris felt that there was a danger of it backfiring because of the graphic nature of the image, and on reflection I was inclined to agree with him. But I'm so outraged at what I've just read that I'm severely tempted to go ahead and post it right here and now - and without shame or apology.

A plea to Yahoo "UK" : would it be possible for me to check my emails without having to wade through Nat-bashing drivel from London-centric "commentators"?

As you can see from the top of the sidebar, I now mainly use a Gmail account, but I still have a Yahoo email account from years ago that I need to check fairly regularly. I'd really like to be able to do that without being forced to pass a link to a "news story" describing Alex Salmond's flag "stunt" (ie. waving the Scottish flag in celebration of the all-time greatest Scottish sporting triumph) as "childish". Or at a pinch, I'd even settle for not having to then find out that the "childish" jibe was solely based on the opinion of a single southern commentator - Ian Dunt - who knows nothing about Scotland and understands even less. Hint : the indulgence of one random man's opinion ain't "news", guys, anymore than the last piece of Scottish political "analysis" that you linked to on the Yahoo UK homepage was news.

In any case, can Dunt convincingly justify his claim that Salmond waving his country's flag was a "stunt" and "childish", when presumably Cameron's repeated breathless attempts to exploit Murray's triumph in the sacred name of Britishness were all perfectly "mature"? You won't be surprised to hear that the answer is a resounding no.

"Not so long ago Alex Salmond was considered a political genius. He outmanoeuvred his Westminster opponents at every turn, ran rings around the vestiges of talent in Hollyrood and struck the right balance of cheery bonhomie and statesmanlike vision in his TV appearances...

But yesterday's clumsy attempt to politicise Andy Murray's Wimbledon win showed the wheels coming off the Salmond bandwagon."

First of all, mate, I hope it's not too cruel of me to point out that most people who know the first thing about Scottish politics are generally aware that there's only one 'l' in the word 'Holyrood'. Secondly, are you seriously telling us that Salmond was a genius - but then he waved a flag and suddenly wasn't anymore? Do you have the faintest idea just how daft that sounds?

Oh, and by the way, if Salmond was indeed considered a genius by Mr Dunt until "not so long ago" (presumably in the halcyon pre-flag days), why did we mysteriously never see any articles on the Yahoo UK homepage telling us about that? Why were we treated to the "insight" of Mr Jeremy Warner instead?

"BBC cameras cut away just as he and his wife were unfurling a large Saltire behind David Cameron's head, amid crowds cheering the historic victory. It would have looked bad if the cameras caught him waving it, but by showing just his frantic efforts to get the flag out, it came across as particularly amateurish."

So let me get this straight - his main shortcoming was failing to hypnotise a television director? Is that what the "pros" do, Ian?

And justify the word "frantic", please. That kind of bluff to support your preferred narrative would work a hell of a lot better if we hadn't all seen the footage for ourselves.

"As Salmond insisted today, he had no control over the seating arrangements, so it wasn't a purposeful effort to photobomb the prime minister. Nevertheless, the short clip made Salmond look cheap, childish and, as Labour MP Tom Harris put it, 'naff'."

Wow. So you've found one Scot to agree with you, Ian - and he just happens to be the right-wing, constitutional reform hating, David Cameron installing, supremely ironic Downfall spoofing, teenage mother bashing, "Admin" of the Labour Hame website. Why not chuck in Duncan Hothersall and make us even more impressed?

"The Murray victory should, if anything, be a boost to the Scottish first minister. While most of the talk – including that from Murray himself – has been of the importance of a British winner in a British sporting event, it cements the impression of Scotland being a country of weight..."

Most of the talk? Would that be most of the talk from people like these who painted the streets of Dunblane in the blue and white of the saltire last September to salute Murray's US Open win? Or are you merely referring to the talk you hear from people very much like yourself, Ian, who live in exactly the same place that you do, ie. London? Or the talk from commentators in the same provincially-minded London media that you yourself are part of? If so, you've unwittingly put your finger right on the nub of this matter - a distorted and unbalanced London-centric perception was precisely the problem to which a well-placed saltire was the solution.

The acres of drivel written about Alex Salmond over the last couple of days - simply for capturing the mood of the nation by doing the most natural thing in the world - leaves only one possible conclusion to be drawn. If opponents of independence in the south of England are that desperate to find the tiniest excuse to smear the leader of the pro-independence movement, they must be profoundly scared of him.