Wings Over Scotland

Readers! Scotland on Sunday’s Euan McColm – who is a proper, mature, grown-up journalist, unlike we scurrilous, anonymous blogger types – has a message for you with regard to modern developments in the financing of alternative media sources.

(As we’re aware that some people are uncomfortable with robust language, we’ve blurred out part of the text for sensitive viewers. Click the image if you have the sturdy constitution necessary to read the uncensored version, along with some more pithy wit from this cuddly, avuncular figure of the “quality” press.)

We’ve been documenting of late how the No campaign has grown increasingly negative and smear-based since the turn of the year, as opinion polls show a trend of small but consistent movement towards independence. One of the core characteristics of negative political campaigning is to accuse your opponents of doing the thing you’re actually doing, and the last couple of days have thrown up some striking examples.

That’s our old pal Euan McColm of the Scotsman, of course. And he’s not alone.

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The Labour Party’s clinging to the pretence of a commitment to multilateral nuclear disarmament is perhaps the most cynical of all the lies it still tells the electorate, on either side of the border. This weekend, as thousands of protesters congregate in Glasgow, Labour activists are mounting a frantic rearguard action pretending that independence and Trident are unconnected issues.

But the feeble smokescreen with which the party attempts to conceal the truth could be blown away by an asthmatic bee. It shouldn’t take too long to run through the logic.

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Ian Taylor, chief executive and president of Vitol, is the donor who just keeps on giving:

“Oil market dealers confirmed on Friday that a Syrian government tender on behalf of state oil company Sytrol for gasoline that closed on the market this week has been picked up by giant oil traders Trafigura and Vitol. Syria exports crude oil, but does not have the refining capacity to meet its domestic needs and relies on petrol imports.

On the same day US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time called for an international boycott of Syrian oil and gas products, and sanctions against its oil and gas industries as the best way of putting pressure on the regime to stop its murderous repression of protests there which began on March 15th and have cost upwards of 1700 lives.”

(Our emphasis, as usual.) To be honest, we hope “Better Together” don’t hand back Mr Taylor’s £500,000 donation. We imagine Yes Scotland will rather enjoy hitting them with this particular oil- and blood-soaked stick all the way to September 2014.

Here’s Ken Macintosh MSP (Labour) on today’s Good Morning Scotland:

GARY ROBERTSON: Do you have concerns about where the funding for the Better Together campaign is coming from? There have been questions about a half-a-million donation from Ian Taylor and his background. Do you have concerns about that as someone who’s part of that campaign?

KEN MACINTOSH: I don’t… I have to say I’m not close enough to the campaign to know. I’ll go have a look at this story afterwards, but I…

GR: It’s been around for a couple of days now. Basically there are question marks about this man’s background and his business dealings in the past. Questions that have been raised at Westminster by Douglas Alexander for instance.

KM: Well, I certainly would want the Better Together campaign to make sure that the people donating to the campaign are abiding by all the laws and are properly scrutinized by it. But no inside knowledge. I’m not close enough to the campaign to be able to tell you that.

It’s a fair comment from the Labour finance spokesman.

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We haven’t heard any more from Ian Taylor’s lawyers yet. But in a surprising development never previously observed on the internet, his attempt to silence various pro-independence voices appears to have resulted in people digging deeper into the affairs of Vitol, the oil-trading company of which he’s been Chief Executive since 1995.

One particularly interesting revelation that we don’t think was covered in any of the earlier articles relates to the company’s conduct in the Republic of the Congo, where they got up to shenanigans a little shadier than simply drinking all the Um Bongo.

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It seems odd to talk of the anti-independence campaign being “desperate” when most polls still give them a significant lead. But to any rational observer the tone of the debate has changed noticeably since the turn of 2013, culminating in the extraordinary and hysterical outburst on the “Better Together” website this week [local copy] when challenged on what we’ll call the “colourful past” of its chief donor Ian Taylor, lest we get any more badly-spelled letters from his lawyers.

(This humble wee website has seen a quite dramatic increase in malicious targeting of various kinds in recent weeks, from legal threats to disgusting personal smearing from No activists and various forms of “cyber warfare”.)

And when you see what the Scotsman’s been reduced to making one of its lead stories this morning, the weight of evidence for the growing state of panic in the No camp becomes hard to ignore.

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This is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall looking comfortable and confident on last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight as the recently-controversial subject of campaign donations was discussed.

Not for the first time, his comments seemed a little at odds with the truth.

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There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.

But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.

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We’ve noted a few times in the past that one of the challenges of highlighting media bias is that you rarely get a chance to directly compare like with like. If a Labour MP is caught up in some sort of scandal and the media soft-pedal it, say, it’s all very well claiming “It’d be different if this was someone in the SNP”, but unless the latter does the exact same thing it’s hard to make it stick.

So this week presents a rare opportunity to study the phenomenon in the flesh, as both the Yes and No campaigns release their lists of campaign contributions so far. Let’s see how it went.

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A few days ago we bemoaned the state of the Royal Mail under its partial privatisation by successive Labour and Tory governments, and noted that often the post didn’t arrive until well into the afternoon. And sure enough, it was only a few minutes ago that we picked this up from the doormat.

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The short version is, we don’t know either.

As of around half an hour ago, the National Collective website looks like this:

The site had recently attracted a great deal of traffic for a post entitled “Dirty Money: The Tory Millionaire Bankrolling Better Together”, which compiled together links to a number of newspaper articles about Ian Taylor, a businessman who donated £500,000 to the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign.

The story was picked up today by the Herald and Daily Record, with the latter’s piece including the line “Vitol said allegations made about them this week were inaccurate and they were taking legal advice”. [EDIT 4.15pm: The Guardian now reports that “the Herald has now had a lawyer’s letter and so too has National Collective”.]

(Possibly coincidentally, the site’s Wikipedia entry has been nominated for deletion.)

As far as we can establish, the stories linked in “Dirty Money” – in, among others, the Guardian, Mirror and Telegraph – are still online. There’s an absurd, huffy, pious whinge on the “Better Together” website complaining with no apparent irony about the article being part of “a co-ordinated dirty-tricks campaign by the nationalists”.

Other than that, we’re as much in the dark as everyone else.