Wings Over Scotland

Here’s the Secretary Of State For Portsmouth, legendary bruiser Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael, in this morning’s Herald on the subject of the dastardly SNP Scottish Government intimidating businesses out of speaking up for the Union:

“Asked if there was a fear factor, Mr Carmichael replied: ‘There is very much. This is what business people tell me; they are scared of the consequences for their business of getting on the wrong side of the Scottish Government.’

Without naming names, he noted: ‘I see it in the media sector. I have seen media outlets feel constrained in their coverage.'”

A random sample from the front page of our “PressReader” newspaper app, there, covering just a single month (March 2013). Heaven help us all if the media suddenly breaks free of these draconian constraints and tells us what it REALLY thinks.

This is from today’s Guardian (our emphasis):

“A spokesman for Better Together said their donations strategy, which allows any UK voter to gift money, was crucial because the Scottish government was devoting significant official resources to campaigning for independence, far outstripping the spending by civil servants in Whitehall.”

Now that’s odd. How would this spokesman know that, given that the UK government refuses to release details of what it’s spending on the anti-independence campaign? If we send in another FOI request claiming to be a No supporter, will we get an answer this time? Maybe we should give it a try.

We’ve only corrected one paragraph in the following otherwise-verbatim story from today’s Daily Record, so that it now says what it actually means rather than the paraphrased family-newspaper version. Can any eagle-eyed readers spot it?

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Now, we’re not putting ourselves up as some sort of expert fundraising authority just because we’ve run a few successful ones, but you didn’t have to be a genius to slap your forehead with your palm last month when the official Yes Scotland campaign AND two of the country’s biggest pro-indy websites (as well as a couple of smaller ones) contrived to launch appeals for very large amounts of cash not only all at once, but in the weeks leading up to Christmas when everyone’s budgets are stretched to the limit.

Bella Caledonia

Newsnet Scotland

Yes Scotland

(To give plenty of notice so that hopefully this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, our second annual Wings fundraiser will be in late February and March 2014.)

Still, we are where we are, and all three are now entering their final phases some way short of their targets. That’s not necessarily a big deal – the Scotland Yet one looked like failing by a big distance at this stage (as did the Common Weal’s before it), but reached the finishing line after a big boost from generous Wings readers.

But time’s getting tight, and the Herald has already had a bit of a sneer about the response to the Yes Scotland pledge drive, so if you can spare a quid or two for any or all of the three, we’re sure it’d be both appreciated and well used, especially in the context of the grisly collection of Tory millionaires, bankers and spooks who just handed “Better Together” another million and a half quid.

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The Huffington Post, 15 December 2013:

“The number of Britons who think Ed Miliband is likely to be the prime minister after the next election has fallen dramatically, according to a poll.

Research by ComRes for the Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror found 21% believed the Labour leader would be in No 10 after the next election, down 10 points since May.”

This, remember, is after a summer in which the nation’s political commentators almost universally agreed that Miliband’s conference promise of an energy price freeze and subsequent talk of a cost-of-living crisis was winning the hearts of the country.

Last week three separate opinion polls showed Labour’s lead over the Tories down to a pitiful five points, despite 70% of the population saying they’d felt no benefit from Britain’s feeble economic “recovery”.

We don’t think Labour has ever sacked a leader who hadn’t contested at least one general election. Ed Miliband will lead them to the polls in 2015, and only one in five Britons thinks he’ll end up in Number 10. Don’t take our word for it. Don’t heed the experts. Don’t even examine the statistics. Listen to the people who’ll be voting.

It was nice to get a wee plug this morning on Radio Scotland’s always-interesting “Headlines” programme. Their online round-up talked about our piece on Scandinavian taxation, and contrasted it with one written by Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser for the right-wing “ThinkScotland” blog, in which he disputed the widely-held, and oft-decried by Yes supporters, notion that the UK was one of the most unequal countries in the civilised world.

Now, anyone who’d also read Wings columnist Julie McDowall’s superb, blood-boiling article on foodbanks in today’s Sunday Herald might naturally be rather sceptical of Fraser’s claim that the UK was an egalitarian paradise of wealth distribution, but he provided a link, so we had a look.

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One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.

That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.

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The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.

Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.

Today is one of those times.

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The Daily Record, 13 December 2013:

But phew – luckily, in the UK there’s always an alternative.

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We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.

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We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.

We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).

Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.

Don’t they?

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Here’s Baron Wallace Of Tankerness on Spain, in 1997:

“Jim Wallace, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, part of the pro-devolution alliance, dismissed the SNP argument and pointed to the success of devolution in Catalonia and Bavaria. ‘Those countries that have devolved have proved successful because they meet the will of the people.'”

Yeah, because devolution killed Catalan nationalism stone dead too, right Jim?