Wings Over Scotland

We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.

Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.

We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:

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Attentive readers will of course recall the shocking revelations from the No campaign earlier this year about the terrifying cost of independence to Scots – £1 a head. But what’s the latest info on the price of staying in the UK?

“The [Institute for Fiscal Studies] data shows that a couple with children, where one parent works, will be worse off by £3,995.65 a year on average after the tax and benefit changes introduced since 2010. Average households will be worse off by £891 a year.”

£1 for independence or £891 for the Union? Tough call.

We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:

It seems fitting somehow.

As we browsed the print edition of the Daily Record today to compare its coverage of the latest independence referendum donations news with the online version (with particular regard to Kevin McKidd), we spotted something else curious.

We’ve already noted a curious hypocrisy in the Scotsman’s reporting of the same issue this morning, where it pointedly questioned whether the SNP had handed over some sizeable donations to the party to the Yes campaign, while allowing Blair McDougall to make a virtue out of the fact that Labour and the Conservatives hadn’t transferred party funds to the No campaign. But the Record’s arithmetic is even more confused than the Scotsman’s logic.

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England:

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And we’re not going to hypocritically pretend that we are.

Glorying in the death of an individual is unseemly, especially one long past the time when they did their damage. Owen Jones put it well here. Today, though, with no shame whatsoever, we celebrate the death of an icon. Not the human being, but the values they stood for and their appalling toxic legacy of what was once a country one could be proud of being a part of.

That country died in 1979, and its corpse was dug up and desecrated in 1997. Nothing we could say, no matter how awful, would be a tenth as despicable as the changes wrought in Britain over those last 34 years. So we’re going to say nothing, and play a song with words that are impossible to make out. You might prefer some others.

Below is a Daily Record story about lots of people giving money to “Better Together” (although confusingly, apparently it’s for an “election” rather than a referendum), accompanied by a large picture of handsome “Trainspotting” star Kevin McKidd.

One might infer, not unreasonably, from the headline and picture that Mr McKidd was one of the No campaign’s “big-hitters”. There’s nothing at all in the article’s text which would dissuade readers from that view.

But hang on – do they mean THIS Kevin McKidd?

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In the world of journalism, being second to a story carries certain advantages. The Sunday Herald scored a high-profile exclusive with its list of “Better Together” donators yesterday, but only told half the tale. Keen-eyed cyber-sleuths immediately started digging, and came up with some troubling information about by far the biggest contributor to the No camp’s fighting fund, excellently and concisely detailed here by Michael Gray of National Collective.

You’d imagine, then, that the likes of the Scotsman – with the advantage of an extra 24 hours to do some investigating and with all the leads already conveniently found and collected together for them – would have come up with some pretty interesting in-depth analysis on the subject, especially given how keen it usually is to look into anyone who financially backs the nationalist side.

(Not to mention the golden opportunity to get one over on its rival’s big exclusive by pointing out what they missed in their haste to be first.)

Oh well.

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Those wishing to read some more detailed background on today’s Scotland on Sunday stushie can find at this link a paper (full title: “Fortify the Cheviots! The Nazis and the Nats”) presented by Gavin Bowd – author of the SoS article in question – to the University of Edinburgh in June 2012. Here’s the opening paragraph for colour:

“In January 1939, Douglas Young, future leader of the SNP, wrote to his fellow poet, George Campbell Hay: ‘If Hitler could neatly remove our imperial breeks somehow and thus dissipate the mirage of Imperial partnership with England etc he would do a great service to Scottish Nationalism’.

Young thus showed the ambiguous, to say the least, attitude of Scottish nationalists towards Fascism. Hatred of the English led to the downplaying of the Fascist threat to freedom and peace, while more radical nationalists could be attracted to the authoritarian and xenophobic solutions offered by the Fuhrer and the Duce.”

Make your own judgements from the evidence.

So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?

After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.

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And we’ll give you a clue – the thing we’re in, we’re in it without a paddle.

The above is a graph released by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, invariably described as a “respected” economic research organisation of no particular political leaning. It’s an analysis of the likely impact of the coalition’s tax and welfare “reforms” on various demographic groups over the period of the current government.

It takes a moment’s study to make sense of (and it’s by far the most accessible thing they publish, though if you’re an economics whiz you can find all sorts of detailed cleverclogs stuff on their website), so we’ll quickly take you through a few bullet points.

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The Telegraph deserves some credit today. It runs a heartbreaking story about the reality of life on benefits, of the sort both the Conservative and Labour parties want to be “tough” on. It’s a piece of gripping, truthful and hard-hitting journalism, highly and properly critical of the party the paper steadfastly supports. Hats off to the author.

Then you read the comments.

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