Wings Over Scotland

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.

Keen followers of the Scottish media may have noticed that since the start of the year there’s been little sight of the phrase “the positive case for the Union”. Perhaps buoyed by opinion polls showing little movement, the No camp has more or less abandoned even the pretence of positivity and concentrated on the tactic it’s most familiar and comfortable with – carpeting Scotland with fearbombs.

The last couple of days have been no exception. At the Scottish Tory conference David Cameron repeated the curiously vague threat that an independent Scotland might not be allowed to keep the pound, and yesterday in Westminster the Home Secretary dropped (implausible) hints that Scots might not be allowed to keep UK passports.

But wait a minute. Why so shy?

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No cause for alarm, just some inescapable events. Probably no posts until later this afternoon, so catch up on the stuff you may have missed over the last few days. THERE WILL BE A QUIZ. (There probably won’t.) (OR WILL THERE?)

As veteran readers will know, there’s little this site enjoys more than investigating the Comical Ali-style claims made by the No campaign about the attendance figures at its events, which it typically likes to exaggerate by between 100% and 150%.

Disturbingly, though, the contagion which robs victims of basic counting powers seems to be infectious, and taking hold even beyond the bounds of “Better Together”.

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Ruth Davidson triumphantly exits the hall to a standing ovation after her keynote speech to the Scottish Conservatives conference yesterday.

The Sunday Herald today gives the total number of delegates attending the conference at just 200 or so (although more on that later). We can count almost 40 empty seats in the picture above, taken from the BBC coverage, which shows one half of the hall, and we presume the other side must have looked pretty similar.

We estimate the the leader’s speech – which is the centrepiece of any political party’s conference – was therefore attended by between 120 and 140 people. Readers might wish to keep that figure in mind the next time Scottish Tories mock an unofficial independence rally for “only” attracting between 6000 and 7000.

“Despite the joint campaign with Labour and the Liberal Democrats against independence, Mr Gove said a No vote would represent a Tory victory.”

Keep that in mind as Alistair Darling speaks at the Scottish Tory conference today.