The image below depicts three of what have been at least four different versions of the Scotsman’s story about our latest Panelbase poll. (So far, that is – who knows what might happen in an hour’s time?)
They show a fascinating evolution of editorial line, wouldn’t you say?
Earlier today we highlighted two pieces of disgraceful, mendacious smearing by The Scotsman, in conjunction with an “anonymous” Labour MP. The articles coincided with a wider campaign of demonisation across most of the Scottish and UK media against supporters of independence, backed up by elected Labour representatives on social media in what might easily be seen as a co-ordinated attack.
The tweets above are from the account of semi-literate Labour councillor for East Kilbride, James Docherty. They follow a week in which the Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray described the placing of one or more small “Yes 2014” stickers on his constituency office windows as an “out of control” escalation of intimidation and Alistair Darling accused some people objecting to a businessman sending a document full of scaremongering lies to 500 employees of his company as “shaming Scotland”.
These hysterical smears would be laughable were it not for the consequences they may yet bring about. We highlight some of those consequences below.
As someone who’s kept them as pets for over 20 years, I know a thing or two about rats. Intelligent and affectionate creatures, individuals nevertheless have very distinct personalities, and occasionally you’ll get a timid and/or grumpy one. Those take a lot of care, patience and attention to bring out of their shell, and until that point they may try to escape and hide in the tiniest, darkest, most inaccessible corner of the house.
When found, and with all escape routes blocked off, these tiny creatures become incredibly ferocious. They have very long, razor-sharp teeth and move with astonishing speed, and won’t hesitate to attack something hundreds of times their size. Any long-term rat owner will have a few small but permanent battle scars.
And so to today’s Scotsman.
“Better Together” communications director Rob Murray:
Labour MSP Neil Findlay:
Don’t you hate these unreliable, low-credibility rogue pollsters, readers?
This is “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling’s interview on this morning’s Andrew Marr Show. Despite the sort of respectful-verging-on-subservient treatment the former Chancellor received from Marr, who uncharacteristically couldn’t bring himself to interrupt during the 10-minute piece, Mr Darling blinked even more furiously than usual throughout a bewildering flurry of contradictions, non-sequiturs and outright falsehoods.
Even Marr was driven to remark on the wealthy Labour MP’s agitated state by the end of the piece, and while it’s very hard to keep up, we recorded a total of 777 blinks in 10 minutes with our manual clicker. Have a go yourself – we suspect it would actually be possible to get results 100 either side of that figure.
Of course, maybe Mr Darling is just overdue a trip to SpecSavers.
By now you may have already seen the headline numbers for our latest Panelbase poll. We hope you don’t mind that we gave the Sunday Times a couple of hours’ lead time in return for some major coverage, but we’ve always said that at this stage the headline numbers are the least interesting findings.
(That’s why our first poll didn’t even bother asking the referendum question.)
We’re actually still waiting on the final full tables for the other 10 questions – we should have them tomorrow – so for now let’s just have a dig around in the top line.
Just to remind readers who haven’t already seen it on Twitter or Facebook – Wings has been under a heavy spam-flood attack for most of today, and we’re having ongoing technical issues with commenting due to security measures while we try to get it all sorted out. Most comments are being treated as first-time users, which means they have to be manually approved, and we’re not sitting up all night doing it.
That means that if you post on the poll story that’s going up at 1am, you might have to wait until daylight hours to see your comment, so please don’t post the same one 40 times trying to make it appear, or a string of increasingly grumpy “Where’s my comment gone?” messages, which won’t appear either.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Sorry to keep you hanging on, readers, but we figured it was worth giving the Sunday Times the exclusive in return for getting the story on the front page.
Please note that this is only the headline Yes/No finding, not the whole poll. Tune in here at 1am for our full analysis of the very interesting Yes/No data.
(We don’t have the tables for the rest of the questions yet).
We appreciate some of you have been struggling to keep up with our investigations into Labour’s devolution proposals. So we’ve boiled it right down.
As far as we’re aware, “the largest arts festival in Europe” (indeed, the largest arts festival anywhere in the world) is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Does anyone remember Ian Murray MP being in charge of it?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
