Wings Over Scotland

We don’t have the faintest idea what effect (if any) the Tory-millionaire-run “Vote No Borders” campaign might be having on the general public, but for those of us analysing the referendum campaign it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Whether it’s the extremely suspicious nature of its funding, its employees airbrushing their CVs to remove any mention of ever working for it or the unashamedly blatant misinformation it’s been pumping out remorselessly over a wide range of subjects, it looks increasingly like a very expensive attempt to make “Better Together” appear moderate, reasonable and likeable by comparison.

Last night, in response to a media furore ignited by Wings Over Scotland’s revelation that it had pulled a cinema ad about the NHS after angry complaints from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the group finally published an extraordinary, sour and petulant official statement about the incident. As far as apologies go, we think it’s fair to say it leaves something to be desired.

It’s well worth a breakdown.

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We’re not sure if these are Scottish Labour’s 3rd-floor office-mates at John Smith House, or just some of the party’s alternative trading names.

The week-long media frenzy that would have surrounded the Scottish Government releasing a key set of figures about independence, only to have them immediately and pointedly disowned by their cited sources as gross distortions misrepresenting the reality by a factor of 12, doesn’t bear thinking about.

(Remind yourself of the 10 desperate days they dragged out of some spectacularly innocuous comments about Vladimir Putin and multiply that by about a thousand.)

The one-sided national embarrassment that is the Scottish media, however, has done its level best to completely bury the wholly-justified anger of Professors Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Robert Young of Western Ontario University.

Neither of the country’s current-affairs TV shows gave the matter more than the most cursory passing mention, nor did most of its newspapers. You’ll search in vain for a story about it in the Guardian, and the Scotsman actually managed to hide its two paragraphs of coverage deep inside pieces attacking the SNP.

A promised interview with Professor Dunleavy on “Good Morning Scotland” never materialised, but the distinguished academic DID eventually surface on Wednesday’s edition of “Newsdrive”. If you click the image above you can listen to the seven-minute slot in its entirety, and wonder just how outrageously the defenders of the Union would have to act to make the front pages of a Scottish newspaper.

From today’s Guardian:

“Labour cannot afford to undo the coalition’s cuts in the next government and must expect to be unpopular, one of the party’s most senior finance spokesmen will say on Friday.

Chris Leslie, the shadow chief secretary to the treasury, will say some of the spending decisions ‘will be the toughest faced by an incoming Labour government for a generation’ if Ed Miliband wins the next election.

‘We won’t be able to undo the cuts that have been felt in recent years, and I know that this will be disappointing for many people. A more limited pot of money will have to be spent on a smaller number of priorities. Lower priorities will get less.'”

And as well as being bad news for the whole UK, we already know what that means for Scotland too. Because Labour has openly said, over and over, what its plans are.

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Alert readers may have spotted that the “Vote No Borders” cinema advert featured on this much-viewed Wings article from a few days ago can no longer be played from the campaign group’s YouTube page, returning a “Private” error.

An even more alert reader, however, had already made a copy.

And while the entire series of ads has now been effectively banned by all of Scotland’s cinema chains, all the other ones are still present on the website while the NHS one (described as “a light-hearted sketch”) has vanished. And now we’ve found out why.

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Here’s an important statistic: almost 40% of people who look at an online article don’t get beyond the headline and strapline. More and more readers fall away the further down the article you get – by the time you’re just a few hundred words in, you’ve probably lost roughly 70% of people who started reading.

So we’re going to try to keep this really short.

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After our series of massively successful fundraisers, and the many others we’ve helped push over the line from various distances, as you might imagine we get a lot of people asking us to plug theirs. We can’t do them all, because otherwise we’d be constantly nagging readers for money day after day and that would get really annoying, but for some time now we’ve been keeping a list of those we know about on our Donate page.

As everyone just got paid, though, here’s a special roundup of current ones.

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This is an extract from a mailshot being sent out by “Better Together” this week, featuring a letter allegedly penned by “Sophie”, a 19-year-old student who – like all of the No camp’s definitely authentic grassroots real Scots of all ages who’ve written such letters for it – speaks in a manner uncannily similar to that of Alistair Darling.

(It’s how all the cool teens talk these days, don’t you know?)

Wait a minute – “walking away from membership of the EU”? We just can’t keep up.

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Here’s the beleaguered Danny Alexander, quoted by the Guardian today (11.27am):

Well, that’s a relief.

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It’s not often that you see the same story on the front page of the i and the Financial Times. It’s even rarer – in fact, perhaps unprecedented – if that story’s about Scotland, because the otherwise-admirable mini-tabloid is barely even aware that there’s a part of the UK north of Newcastle.

(Its parent paper, the Independent, is we think unique among national UK newspapers in not even having a Scotland section, let alone a Scottish edition.)

So when it happens, you know it must be a pretty darned significant story – one which the Scottish press will be all over like a swarm of wasps at a jam-factory picnic. Right?

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This is a lengthy piece of audio at 64 minutes, but we recommend it highly.

The man speaking is Neil Walsh, who’s the Pensions Officer of the Prospect trade union (scientists, engineers, professionals). The recording is of a conference call that he conducted for the union’s members this week dealing with the ramifications of independence for, funnily enough, pensions.

Prospect is a UK-wide union with a position of complete neutrality on the referendum, and no sides are taken. All you’ll hear is an Irishman with no dog in the indyref fight calmly and rationally assessing the issues from the perspective of his 140,000 members and their interests.

It may be the sanest and most reasonable thing you hear in the entire independence debate. If you’re worried about your pension, or you know someone who is, you need to listen to it, and the sooner the better.

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Ever since our insanely successful fundraiser we’ve been pondering on the best way to get printed materials and promotional stuff spread across Scotland without spending hours every day lugging boxes of stuff down to the post office, what with us still being an inconvenient distance from the action.

We may have just solved the problem.

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