Wings Over Scotland

We almost feel sorry for the UKIP candidate for Aberdeen Donside, poor Otto Inglis. All day today he’s been pictured on news bulletins standing silently like a spare object at a wedding while broadcasters interviewed his party’s leader Nigel Farage instead.

Then again, after the brutal shoeing Mr Farage took from STV’s Bernard Ponsonby this evening, perhaps Mr Inglis will be feeling he got the best end of the deal.

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Last night’s extended edition of Newsnight Scotland was a special “no men allowed” independence debate. Unlike last week’s Question Time, the BBC at least offered a panel comprising equal representation from both sides, and one of the panellists was Amanda Harvie, introduced as a business consultant and former chief executive of a financial-services industry body, Scottish Financial Enterprise.

Ms Harvie claimed (around 42m into the programme) that she wasn’t an official ‘Better Together’ representative, “nor do I speak for a political party – I’m a businesswoman”. But an alert reader noticed that she looked a lot like another Amanda Harvie.

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That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:

The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.

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The producers of Game Of Thrones, a complex fantasy drama filled with sex and violence (and quite coincidentally also one of the most popular shows currently on TV), considered shooting the hit series in Scotland but were unable to do so because of a lack of quality studio space, the Scotsman reveals today.

The show ended up being shot in Northern Ireland (at the Titanic Studios in Belfast) instead, bringing benefits of an estimated £60m to the region’s economy with around £160m more expected over several years of production.

According to the report a high-profile film source said:

“When contemplating where to shoot Game of Thrones, HBO first thought of Scotland. The settings were a natural fit: hills and glens and rugged castles. However, the lack of a studio meant the production logistics, control and cost made no sense to production planners.”

But there’s an interesting undercurrent to this tale of woe.

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Last week the Scottish Government’s Rural Affairs Secretary, Richard Lochhead, found himself accused of ‘politicising’ this year’s Royal Highland Show, by giving a speech there on the potential benefits of independence to the farming community.

Lib Dem spokesman Tavish Scott (pictured above) complained that:

“The SNP’s decision to politicise this year’s Highland Show is regrettable. Taxpayers’ money is being used to give a nationalist a political platform to rubbish the UK. The Highland Show should be a platform for Scotland’s livestock and food – not for constitutional politics.”

Most of the papers, however, were quick to point out the apparent glaring hypocrisy of the fact that ‘Better Together’ would also be campaigning at the event, and launching a special ‘No’ campaign for farmers called ‘Rural Better Together’ at an event scheduled to follow just minutes behind Mr Lochhead’s address.

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Looks like we’ve got another difference of opinion, Geoffrey.

“The late Brian Adam, whose untimely death has prompted the by-election, won with just under 56 per cent of the vote two years ago with nearly two votes to Labour’s one.

But a lot has changed since Adam’s glory night. Then, a popular and charismatic SNP, which had pragmatically negotiated four years of minority rule at Holyrood, was rewarded with an epic victory across Scotland. Now, facing pressure over its preparations for independence, and carrying the burden of a monopoly on power, it is a very different world.

Alex Salmond’s stratospheric popularity ratings of two summers ago have dipped back to earth. Labour is, once again, snapping at the SNP’s heels.”

That’s the Scotland On Sunday view (in an article which appears to be littered with several troublingly major factual errors, such as claiming the Aberdeen bypass is “still in the courts” when it isn’t, and asserting that numerous very real and operational institutions haven’t been built yet when they rather visibly have).

But the Sunday Herald is getting quite different vibes from its people on the ground.

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Because they can’t both be.

“Scotland sees rise in number of race hate cases“

(Headline in today’s Scotsman.)

“Overall, however, there was a decrease in both racist and religiously aggravated offending in Scotland”

(Actual text of the same article.)

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So, everyone turned up for Question Time in the end. We expected no different. As far as we can ascertain, the view in the pro-independence community was that the SNP’s Angus Robertson acquitted himself well as the sole political representative of the Yes campaign, and it was interesting and welcome to see journalist Lesley Riddoch (who was also assured and compelling) actually nail her colours to the Yes mast too.

But what of the show itself? Were the fears of independence supporters justified, or did the BBC mount an impeccable exercise in impartiality? Let’s find out.

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We’re struggling to think of a reason why the SNP’s Angus Robertson (and to a slightly lesser extent journalist Lesley Riddoch) would still want to turn up for tonight’s Question Time in Edinburgh. Up against four anti-independence panellists, Robertson can’t expect to achieve much other than looking embattled and defensive – he can surely hope for little protection from David Dimbleby in the chair.

Riddoch has already tweeted about the show’s imbalanced line-up. If our memory serves us correctly, she’s a firm advocate of the policy of male speakers refusing to appear on heavily gender-imbalanced panels (which tonight’s QT also is), so why not politically-skewed ones too?

It seems to this site that principled withdrawal is by far the better option.

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We were going to do something on the disgraceful line-up of tonight’s edition of Question Time, broadcasting from Edinburgh with an audience of 16/17-year-olds, but frankly we couldn’t put it any better than the Scottish Green Party’s official complaint to the Corporation has. You can read it in full here.

UKIP have no Westminster MPs, no Holyrood MSPs and no Welsh AMs, and attract a microscopic proportion of the vote in Scottish elections, yet their leader Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time (14) than any other politician since 2009. The Greens have representation in both Westminster and Holyrood, but the Scottish party has been invited onto QT just once in the same period.

The show’s guest list tonight will uphold the BBC’s standard debate policy of four anti-independence politicians (Farage plus George Galloway, Anas Sarwar and Ruth Davidson) against a single pro-independence one (the SNP’s Angus Robertson) with a token neutral (Scotsman journalist Lesley Riddoch). Enjoy. We’ll be playing poker.

Did something really dramatic just happen without anyone noticing? Yesterday we passingly noted a curious new trend in the Scottish media: that of Unionist papers complaining that the problem with independence is that it isn’t independent enough.

But it wasn’t until we went back and had a closer look at yesterday’s Daily Record that the full strangeness of the picture became clear.

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It’s like they’re actually writing the jokes for us.

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