Wings Over Scotland

We had a bit of a debate at the weekend with ITV’s generally pretty decent Scotland correspondent Peter Smith, after he tweeted this:

It wasn’t the curious choice of picture we objected to, nor the fact that the £14.8bn figure is a notional sum which is totally meaningless in the context of an independent Scotland (because it represents a vague estimate of the disaggregated finances of a Scotland that’s inside the UK and subject to UK government policy choices).

Nor was it even the implication that a £14.8bn “black hole” was an inherent permanent feature of the Scottish economy rather than an unusually bad year.

What chafed with us was the idea that it was somehow Nicola Sturgeon’s fault.

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Here’s David Mundell on Sunday Politics earlier today:

It’s a pretty uncomfortable time. But it could have been a lot worse.

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Hardcore nutter collective Scotland In Union are already the de facto unofficial No campaign group for the second independence referendum.

Evidently very well-connected and already flush with cash from sources unknown, the limited company recently raised a reported £300,000 for itself at a “charity” dinner attended by such luminaries of the great and the good as Lord Alistair Darling, Lord Dunlop and (um) Willie Rennie, auctioning off exotic high-end goodies like hunting trips to Africa, polo parties with the Maharajah of Jodhpur and Alpine holidays described in the lavish 60-page auction catalogue as featuring:

“A fabulous chalet and a family home, with six bedrooms sleeping 12, all en suite. Although the chalet does not come with a chalet girl, we will provide one for you.”

(There were also some signed JK Rowling books for the paupers.)

So that’s nice. Extremely wealthy people – just getting into the dinner was £250 – who are doing very well out of the way things are, donating big wads of money to some other people trying to ensure that the rich folk stay that way. No law against it. But just who are the true believers rushing bravely to the defence of the Union’s elites?

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There was a rather comforting predictability about the headlines the Scottish media greeted the first day of the SNP conference in Glasgow with.

Unsurprisingly, the Express’ lead story was a piece of fabricated drivel based on alleged quotes from an unnamed source claiming that the Scottish Government would resign in order to force an election and win a mandate that it already has.

(The SNP’s manifesto this May, on which it won a third landslide election victory in a row, clearly reserved the right to call a second referendum should there be a serious material change in circumstances, explicitly citing the Brexit scenario as an example.)

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, puffed up a load of entirely fact-free press-release foaming from some Tory list MSP nobody’s ever heard of into “news”, in the process somehow managing to twist the economic consequences of the Brexit vote caused by his own party into a bewilderingly illogical attack on Scottish independence.

Both articles are essentially the sort of comedy pastiches of terrible journalism one might create as a cautionary example in a media studies degree course, so we’ll waste no more of your time on them. The Herald’s piece, though, is at least marginally more interesting.

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Alert readers may recall that almost three years ago, the No campaign issued a series of dire warnings that independence could cause supermarket prices to rise:

Thankfully, by staying in the UK and therefore leaving the EU, Scotland etc etc.

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Readers may be aware that Wings Over Scotland is (fairly remarkably, really) the UK’s second-most-read politics blog, behind the hardcore right-wing “Guido Fawkes”.

Our “competitor” isn’t a site we look at a lot – the comments make the Daily Mail readership seem like enlightened and thoughtful moderates – but last week someone asked us about a smear piece they’d run on SNP MP Corri Wilson, and we only just remembered today to check it out. Our initial findings weren’t well received.

It seems that Mr Fawkes and his minions aren’t too keen on scrutiny themselves.

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It’s Siobhan again, readers.

Ever since Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden jumped ship to go and rearrange the deckchairs for Labour, his former paper has very noticeably toned down its hysterical “SNP BAD” content. We can go through the Mail for days on end now without finding some ludicrously distorted misrepresentation or screaming outrage piece about how a Nat MP found 20p down the back of their sofa without declaring it to HMRC or such.

Happily, as we’ve been noting recently, the Daily Express has leapt into the breach.

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Because the party is still stuffed with braindead cockroaches like this:

People of North Ayrshire, you’ve got a real prize there. Well done you.

The next Scottish council elections are in May next year.

We fully endorse this message from LBC’s James O’Brien.

It wasn’t easy to find a positive side for this.

But we suppose that it’ll at least be bleakly funny, whenever the second independence referendum comes round, watching Labour try to sell a vote for the UK as a vote for internationalist brotherhood and solidarity.

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To be honest, readers, we gave up on taking any notice of David Torrance‘s mundane attempts at trolling in the Herald some time ago. But some alert readers pointed us towards this week’s column, suggesting that it was a bald rewriting of history some way beyond their usual bland irritancy.

This was the passage they objected to:

It’s a patronising piece of “shut up and eat your cereal” condescension for sure. But to be fair to Torrance, it does also happen to be true. Wait, not true. The other thing.

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The starting pistol hasn’t actually been fired on the two-year Brexit process yet, but now we have a clear statement of when it will be: this morning on The Andrew Marr Show, the Prime Minister pledged that it would happen before the end of next March.

When she gave a speech to the Conservative conference later, Theresa May did even more than that. By the common consensus of the punditariat – whatever that’s worth these days – May’s message was that the UK was heading for the “hard” version of Brexit, with the single market sacrificed for control of borders.

(We might end up broke, in other words, but at least we’ll be good old British broke, with none of those awful smelly foreign Euro-Johnnies around to see it.)

And nobody was getting a sick note.

And for supporters of independence, that’s about as good as news gets.

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