Wings Over Scotland

…on whether 16/17-year-olds are smart enough to vote. Here’s one of Scotland’s bright young things on last night’s Question Time, talking about independence:

“Do you [Angus Robertson] not think the SNP are mucking us about right now? Because we’re not even getting answers on will we have free tuition… how are we going to know that our education’s going to be as good as it is right now?”

Yikes.

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We’re struggling to think of a reason why the SNP’s Angus Robertson (and to a slightly lesser extent journalist Lesley Riddoch) would still want to turn up for tonight’s Question Time in Edinburgh. Up against four anti-independence panellists, Robertson can’t expect to achieve much other than looking embattled and defensive – he can surely hope for little protection from David Dimbleby in the chair.

Riddoch has already tweeted about the show’s imbalanced line-up. If our memory serves us correctly, she’s a firm advocate of the policy of male speakers refusing to appear on heavily gender-imbalanced panels (which tonight’s QT also is), so why not politically-skewed ones too?

It seems to this site that principled withdrawal is by far the better option.

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We were going to do something on the disgraceful line-up of tonight’s edition of Question Time, broadcasting from Edinburgh with an audience of 16/17-year-olds, but frankly we couldn’t put it any better than the Scottish Green Party’s official complaint to the Corporation has. You can read it in full here.

UKIP have no Westminster MPs, no Holyrood MSPs and no Welsh AMs, and attract a microscopic proportion of the vote in Scottish elections, yet their leader Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time (14) than any other politician since 2009. The Greens have representation in both Westminster and Holyrood, but the Scottish party has been invited onto QT just once in the same period.

The show’s guest list tonight will uphold the BBC’s standard debate policy of four anti-independence politicians (Farage plus George Galloway, Anas Sarwar and Ruth Davidson) against a single pro-independence one (the SNP’s Angus Robertson) with a token neutral (Scotsman journalist Lesley Riddoch). Enjoy. We’ll be playing poker.

Did something really dramatic just happen without anyone noticing? Yesterday we passingly noted a curious new trend in the Scottish media: that of Unionist papers complaining that the problem with independence is that it isn’t independent enough.

But it wasn’t until we went back and had a closer look at yesterday’s Daily Record that the full strangeness of the picture became clear.

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With apologies to both The Jungle Book and Animal Farm.

But seriously – how DOES one tell Tories and Labour apart nowadays? Policies?

(JOKE.)

It’s like they’re actually writing the jokes for us.

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The Scottish press has reacted in a fairly typical manner to the release yesterday of a Scottish Government-commissioned report on the implications of independence on welfare, which is to say by finding the most doom-laden interpretation of it possible.

Leading the charge is the Daily Record, with a piece that online goes by the relatively restrained headline “Undoing hated Con-Dem cuts could could put all benefit payments at risk, SNP are warned” (though the print version screams “SNP TOLD YOU CAN’T CUT TORY CUTS”). The Scotsman follows along with “SNP welfare plan ‘a risk’”.

Both, though, are telling a deeply – and obviously – misleading story.

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The mechanics of our job got a lot harder and more unpleasant this month. First, an unknown issue has made Firefox (our web browser of choice) almost unuseable for the past couple of weeks, due to a catastrophic performance collapse that means we have to sit around for 20+ seconds every single time we open a new page (or edit one) before we can do anything in it, with every open tab frozen in the meantime.

As our work involves a lot of jumping around and cross-referencing numerous sites, the cumulative effect of the constant slowdowns is frankly horrendous.

(We’ve found other people with the same problem – “It’s like wading through glue”, said one – but no explanation, and therefore no imminent prospect of a fix.)

Then today Echofon, our preferred Twitter client – vital for staying on top of news as it happens, crowdsourcing research and communicating with both readers and public figures – also died. It’s been on borrowed time for a while, no longer supported by the developers, but today Twitter switched off the API that made it work.

So we’re sending out a distress call.

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A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, for the sake of a change of scenery and a few convivial drinks with the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier and others, a meeting of the Oxfordshire branch of the Green Party. The subject of the meeting was Scottish independence, which as you might imagine is something of a niche interest in Oxford (let alone among Greens in Oxford).

I don’t precisely recall the number of people who turned up (see “convivial drinks”), but if it wasn’t more than the Scottish Tories drew to the above meeting, hosted by party leader Ruth Davidson, it was certainly within two or three people of it.

For some reason nobody filmed us for the telly, though.

We know we’ve gone on about this subject quite a bit. But in all fairness to Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, she’s hardly trying to conceal the constitutional reality of a post-No-vote Scotland if the Tories have anything to do with it.

What continues to mystify us, though, is why every single mainstream-media journalist keeps inaccurately reporting that the “line in the sand” leader has become a miraculous convert to the idea of devolving more power to Holyrood, when Davidson herself keeps making it absolutely clear what she’s really talking about.

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This select gathering is all the Scottish Conservative conference delegates who were interested in discussing the party’s approach to devolving more powers to the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote in the independence referendum of 2014.

Readers far more cynical than ourselves may find the picture a useful gauge by which to measure the true degree of interest the Tories have in more powers.