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Archive for April, 2012


Minding your own business 2

Posted on April 05, 2012 by

Pretty much every newspaper and media source ran with a particular statistic as their headline from the published conclusions of the UK government's consultation on the independence referendum. More or less everywhere led with the 75% of respondents who wanted a single Yes/No question, which is mildly curious because it's not really news – the stated preference of every party and MSP in the Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Government itself, is already for a single question.

The Secretary of State for Scotland loudly proclaimed that the consultation had therefore delivered a mandate to get on with the referendum on the UK government's terms, meaning a single question as quickly as possible and no votes for 16/17-year-olds. But the respondents to the consultation actually presented a much more significant demand: a similarly large majority of them – 72% – expressed the view that what they really wanted the UK government to do was butt the hell out altogether and give the Scottish Government the power to get on with it.

For some reason, Moore and the Scottish media weren't so keen to draw attention to that particular finding. But it would appear to mean that the electorate overwhelmingly want the Scottish Parliament – the only body which has an actual democratic mandate to hold a referendum on independence at all – to handle the entire matter without interference from Moore and his coalition colleagues.

We look forward, therefore, to the Scottish Secretary and his chums – having made their point and stated their views – keeping their noses out from now on, waiting for the Scottish Government to conclude its own (far more popular) consultation, and make its own decisions about the number and wording of the questions, the timing of the vote and the extent of the franchise. As democrats, we're sure they'll happily comply with the wishes of the people.

Anas Sarwar is a liar 18

Posted on April 04, 2012 by

We invite the de facto leader of Scottish Labour to sue us if the title of this article is libellous. But the facts seem to us to be clear and incontrovertible. On BBC1’s weekend political programme Sunday Politics Scotland on the 1st of April 2012, Anas Sarwar was interviewed by Isabel Fraser, along with the SNP’s Stewart Hosie.

Below is a transcript of part of the discussion, on the subject of Labour’s allegations that the Scottish Government’s consultation on the independence referendum was “designed for abuse”. It begins 43m 36s into the show, just after Fraser has suggested to Sarwar that the consultation process is in fact, as stated by Hosie, identical to those previously conducted by Labour.

SARWAR: It isn’t the same as previous processes, because you don’t even have to submit an email address or any form of identity to put in an anonymous response, and you can put in multiple anonymous responses… on the second point that Stewart raised around the Labour Party’s own website, you have to put in an email address and a name to be able to respond, so it’s not an anonymous response that you could put in from our own site.

FRASER: But you could put in multiple responses from that address.

SARWAR: No, you have to put in your own name and an email address, which, which you can’t use multiple…

FRASER: So you’re monitoring it, and you will ensure that?

SARWAR: Absolutely, there’s no multiple responses, they can see exactly who has put in a response with their name and also their email address.

Sarwar then repeats the allegation that the process was“not only open to abuse, it’s designed for abuse” by the SNP. Fraser puts it to Hosie that that’s a very significant accusation and asks him if he accepts the charge.

HOSIE: What’s more disturbing is Anas Sarwar there saying that the responses through the Labour Party website are being monitored. That clearly is very worrying indeed, if the Labour Party are able to monitor responses through their website to a public consultation. That’s extremely concerning indeed that you said that.

SARWAR: That’s not what I said, Stewart. What I said was –

HOSIE: You said they were being monitored.

SARWAR: – there are individual, individual email addresses and names –

HOSIE: You said they were being monitored.

SARWAR: – individual email addresses and names that would go in from our responses. The point I’m making, and this is clear – I am making that accusation that the SNP are looking like they’re trying to rig this referendum.

(We’ll ignore the cowardly weasel-worded smear “I am making the accusation that the SNP are looking like they’re trying to rig this referendum” for now.)

We’ll be clear: Sarwar’s statements in the transcript above are lies. That’s not a matter of our interpretation or opinion, but empirical fact. You do NOT “have to put in your own name” on Labour’s form. Wings Over Scotland has already proved this by submitting a consultation response through the form using Anas Sarwar’s name, along with the email address “anas.sarwar@scottishlabour.org.uk”. We are not Anas Sarwar.

Sarwar’s repeated claim that “no multiple responses” are possible through the form is also a lie – there are no discernible safeguards against either fake names or multiple responses on the site, as we also verified by successfully submitting further multiple entries through the same form, including this one in which we used the name “anonymous” and the email address “anonymous@anonymous.com”.

Sarwar’s position on whether Labour are monitoring the responses in order to potentially catch these abuses is doubly untruthful. When Fraser asks him “So you’re monitoring [the responses via the form]?”, he answers “Absolutely” (although our experiments suggest this is not the case), yet mere seconds later when Hosie expresses concern about this admission, he replies “That’s not what I said”, even though it was, as an indisputable matter of record, precisely what he said.

The Scottish media, it probably goes without saying, has not challenged Sarwar on these easily-demonstrable lies. As Sarwar was nominated by Scottish Labour to be its spokesman for the issue on Sunday Politics Scotland, we believe it’s reasonable to assume, furthermore, that his responses were not made out of simple ignorance.

Should Mr Sarwar contact us to explain that in fact it was the case that he simply had no idea what he was talking about, we will gladly withdraw our allegations and issue an apology to that effect. But in the absence of any such statement, the evidence makes it impossible for us to reach any other conclusion than that he deliberately and knowingly lied to Isabel Fraser, Stewart Hosie and the Scottish people.

We do not believe such a person is fit for office in one of the nation’s biggest political parties, or indeed to be a Member of Parliament. We think most people would agree, and we call on Anas Sarwar to resign both positions immediately.

Jigging in the rigging 11

Posted on April 04, 2012 by

The agenda behind the Unionist parties and media's concerted smear campaign against the Scottish Government's independence-referendum consultation has become a little clearer today, with the publication of the full data regarding the UK Government's own survey on the subject. Which, purely for the purposes of local colour, we'll passingly note was impartially called "The Referendum on Separation for Scotland" and opens with the following words:

"We believe passionately in the United Kingdom and recognise the benefits it has brought to all of its citizens. For over 300 years the United Kingdom has brought people together in the most successful multi-national state the world has ever known. We want to keep the United Kingdom together."

(The Scottish Government consultation, in contrast, begins with the somewhat less partisan line "The people who live in Scotland are the best people to make decisions about Scotland’s future.")

Conducted by a committee on which no SNP representatives serve, the UK consultation attracted a dismal response by comparison. The Holyrood version, which is still ongoing, had as of Monday this week atttracted 11,986 contributions from members of the public so far. The Westminster report drew a pitiful 2,857 by comparison, but the picture is in fact even bleaker than that.

Of that 2,857 a staggering 1500 responses (or 53%) are believed to have come directly from the Scottish Labour website. Of those, almost half – 740 – used the exact pre-scripted wording written by Labour. (These numbers do not appear in the consultation document, but the latter was freely admitted by the Secretary of State for Scotland to several news sources this morning.)

Under the rules demanded by Labour this week for the Scottish Government's consultation, 739 of those submissions would have to be disqualified on the grounds of duplication, reducing the total number of valid responses to 2,118.

A further 101 respondents were anonymous, and another 118 were duplicate responses which didn't come from the Labour website. Removing those leaves the UK Government's consultation on the independence referendum based on just 1,899 responses from members of the public (that's one for every 34,229 people in the UK).

But perhaps more pertinent than this abysmal level of public confidence in the UK Government's consultation compared to the Scottish Government's one is the staggering degree to which Labour, rather than the general public, swamped the process in submissions. Of those 1,899 eligible responses, it would appear that 761 – or a tiny fraction under 40% – came directly from the Scottish Labour website.

So over half of all submissions, 40% of valid submissions, and an astonishing 25% of the entire consultation response made up of ineligible duplicate spam entries, came from Labour itself. Yet a compliant media has collaborated all week in creating a media portrayal of SNP "abuse" of the Scottish Government's consultation, based around just 3.5% of anonymous responses (contributions whose actual preferences, it should be noted, were not recorded, and which therefore may well in fact have been partly or even entirely from pro-Union supporters rather than nationalists).

We've said it before and we'll say it again – it's not paranoia if there really is a conspiracy against you. We doubt the electorate is all that concerned with the entire point-scoring business, but we're confident that those who are will have no difficulty in seeing the reality of what's been going on.

We are Spartacus 12

Posted on April 02, 2012 by

In the light of the hoo-ha about the referendum consultation, we thought it was about time we submitted our own response. We couldn't really be bothered going through the whole palaver of the detailed questionnaire on the Scottish Government's website, though, so we thought we'd avail ourselves of the handy one-click form thoughtfully supplied by Scottish Labour for that very purpose.

Weirdly, despite asking for "your views" Labour had already typed out some views for us to have into the message box, but we weren't sure we wanted them to speak for us so we entered something else. And since we wanted to be sure it wasn't dismissed as a fake, we decided to use the name of someone trustworthy who knows that a name and email address provides foolproof identity verification and democratic accountability.

We clicked the Send button, and the rigorous monitoring process which the Scottish Labour deputy leader spoke of on The Sunday Politics Scotland yesterday duly authenticated our submission, and then asked us to get our friends to join in.

That's you, readers, so why not do your democratic duty and have a go too? (We had a practice run while pretending to be one of our friends, just to make sure it worked, and Labour's watertight security safeguards also ratified that submission, so you can rest assured that you shouldn't have any technical problems.) We owe it to Scotland.

Marks & Spencer RACISM shock 5

Posted on April 02, 2012 by

Spotted yesterday in the "Easter goods" section of the Bath branch:

WoSland wishes to make clear that "chocolate face" is not and has never been an acceptable form of address towards anyone. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

The Big Lie and the many small lies 18

Posted on April 02, 2012 by

We’ve referenced “The Big Lie” before on Wings Over Scotland. As that link explains, it’s a propaganda technique invented by Adolf Hitler in order to convince people of particularly enormous untruths. It’s one often employed by the Unionist parties, especially Labour – to name but one example, their persistent labelling of the SNP as “Tartan Tories”, despite the independently-assessed facts that the SNP are considerably to the left of Labour on the political spectrum, and that on an equally impartial policy-convergence test it’s Labour who are by far the closest of all Scotland’s parties to the Conservatives in terms of ideology.

But while in the internet age the Big Lie is harder to get away with, recently Labour and its ever-compliant friends in the Scottish media have begun to utilise a subtle twist on the method – the Big Lie Made Up Of Many Small Lies. This new variant can be seen most clearly in this weekend’s co-ordinated, manufactured outbreak of outrage about the Scottish Government’s consultation on the independence referendum.

Scotland On Sunday went with the story first, in an embarrassingly transparent and incoherent piece from Tom Peterkin, and the Scotsman clearly thought the “scandal” good enough to also lead with it on today’s front page, under the gibberish headline “Nationalists anonymous spark new referendum dispute“.

(Is “Nationalists Anonymous” some sort of support group for Labour, Lib Dem and Tory members who back independence? If so, their name is a proper noun and really ought to have both of its words capitalised.)

The Herald also runs a front-page lead on the same topic, entitled “Salmond accused of rigging poll feedback“, and it was the main item on The Sunday Politics Scotland, with Scottish Labour’s de facto leader Anas Sarwar given lots of airtime to attack the SNP’s increasingly effective Stewart Hosie on the allegations (who comported himself extremely well, and is fast becoming one of the party’s most reliable assets).

But the reason the Big Lie Made Up Of Many Small Lies is an effective technique is that it makes it considerably harder for the victim of the lie(s) to refute it/them, simply because it’s hard to know where to start. To illustrate the point, let’s see if we can break down this particular Big Lie (“The SNP are rigging the consultation!”) into just some of its component parts.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scot The Difference 23

Posted on April 01, 2012 by

Can any alert readers pick out the interesting contradiction from this page in today’s Scotland On Sunday? (Specifically the absurd piece of drivel by Tom Peterkin the paper has chosen to manufacture some embarrassing fake outrage over.) If you don’t have the eyes of a hawk, click on the image to see it full size.

First to spot it wins dinner with Tom Harris. Losers get two dinners with Tom Harris.

A new low 1

Posted on April 01, 2012 by

Normally we enjoy a little chuckle at Kevin McKenna’s weekly column in the Guardian, as befits one of the stalwarts of our Zany Comedy Relief link section. On taking an early peek at this week’s effort, it looked to be one of those rare occasions when Kevin takes a break from slagging off the SNP and talks about something else, but instead we were horrified to witness one of the most despicable things we’ve seen in the mainstream “quality” press for quite some time.

Read the rest of this entry →

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