Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday the UK government put out what was even by its standards a ludicrously hyperbolic piece of scaremongering about the costs of independence, suggesting that to set up all the governmental bodies the new state would require might come with an eye-watering price tag of £2.7 billion.

Its citing of the London School of Economics made it particularly interesting to hear what Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE actually said about the figures.

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Alert followers of our Twitter feed will have learned over recent months that we have a seriously uncanny ability to influence the outcome of football matches. Need your side to grab a couple of quick goals? Just get us to tweet “Team X looks like they couldn’t score if they played till next Thursday” and get ready to watch the net bulge.

(One day we’ll reveal the size of the bribe we took from a shady consortium of wealthy Hamilton Accies fans during the SPFL playoff against Hibs on Sunday.)

And now it looks like that talent has extended itself to newspapers.

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We’re rather kicking ourselves for not having spotted this one when it was staring us in the face, so kudos to Welsh professor of political science Roger Scully for the catch.

In the 2009 European elections, UKIP got 16.5% of the vote in the UK as a whole, and 5.2% in Scotland – a gap of 11.3%. In this year’s election the tallies were 27.5% in the UK and 10.5% in Scotland – a gap of 17%.

In other words, despite all the bluster from Unionists about how Scotland can no longer claim to be different to the rest of the UK in terms of supporting Nigel Farage’s party, in fact the degree of difference has substantially increased, by a whopping 55%.

It just seems worth pointing out.

According to Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine, this afternoon Johann Lamont issued a press release bizarrely calling on all supporters of “progressive” politics to unite against the SNP and UKIP. Now, that’s fairly mindboggling in itself in all sorts of ways, but we can’t help wondering whether she ran it past her deputy first.

Because that tweet raises a whole host of questions.

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Some considered thoughts on the evening’s events, then.

Yeah, nice work, Britain.

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Multiple journalists are now reporting that no matter what the result of the Western Isles count tomorrow, UKIP have pipped the SNP, by a narrow margin, to Scotland’s sixth European Parliament seat.

Scots, you just let David Coburn speak for you on an international stage. Well done.

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Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)

And it seems our critiques have already hit home.

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Having spent the last few months pleading poverty and pitiful-underdog status, “Better Together” this week appeared to have suddenly remembered that £500,000 cheque it got ages ago from Tory oil tycoon (and friend of genocidal war criminals everywhere) Ian Taylor, and started spending some of it.

12-page colour inserts in newspapers like the Daily Record and Guardian don’t come cheap, and hundreds of thousands of Scots found themselves looking at a small booklet which didn’t identify its source until the very last page, and could have been taken by the unwary to have been a production by the newspapers themselves.

(Especially given the little pale blue “sticker” on the front using what looks very much like the Guardian’s own typeface).

But that was the least of the dishonesty in “The Facts You Need”.

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A thing we’ve noticed throughout the referendum campaign is just how delicate many of those on the No side are when faced with any sort of unfavourable information. Having perhaps expected a very easy ride, a lot of Unionists (and indeed several journalists) have proven terribly thin-skinned, with a tendency to fly off the handle at comically slight amounts of challenge.

The Secretary of State for Portsmouth, for example, having been introduced into the debate as a “bruiser”, hadn’t been in his post five minutes before he was bawling to STV’s Rona McDougall for protection as the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon hammered him with nothing more than a few facts and arguments.

When placed under even the tiniest modicum of pressure, No-camp figures will panic and start blurting out the most ludicrous claims, like Ian Davidson’s extraordinary, petulant “Newsnat Scotland” outburst at a justifiably offended Isabel Fraser, or Alistair Darling’s mad assertion that North Sea oil was on course to run out in January 2017.

And so it was this week with Tory MSP Murdo Fraser.

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For quite some time now, and in particular since the turn of the year, this site’s been pointing out two things about polling for the 2015 UK general election.

One is that Labour’s lead has been in steady decline since 2012. The other is that the polls present a falsely optimistic picture for Ed Miliband’s party, as ultimately a significant proportion of UKIP support is likely to vote tactically, because only two people have a chance of becoming Prime Minister and only one of them is promising what UKIP supporters want above all else – a referendum on leaving the EU.

Pleasingly, on one level at least, today we were proved right.

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While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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