Wings Over Scotland

It’s weird watching the Sunday papers all decrying the media’s handling of Wednesday’s leaked Scottish Government document. Everyone seems to agree that the Cabinet paper wasn’t any kind of smoking gun – the consensus is that John Swinney’s comments were sensible, cautious and largely misrepresented in the press.

Eddie Barnes in Scotland on Sunday, for example, noted that “Few of the issues presented within the report were in any way revelatory” (though it didn’t stop him from referring to them as “revelations” later in the piece anyway), but then diffidently observed that they “produced a disastrous set of headlines”, as if his own publication hadn’t written any of them, and as if it wasn’t continuing to do so on the very same day Barnes’ piece hit the newsstands.

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Poe’s Law, which we only discovered on Wikipedia this morning, says that “without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism”. Or in other words, there’s a name for when people are so batshit crazy you can’t satirise them, because you simply couldn’t invent anything madder than what they say for real.

It’s in that context we invite readers to consider a recent story in the Scottish Sun.

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We’ve just had to have a bit of a sit down after trying in vain to get our heads around the dizzying spin deployed in a story in this morning’s Herald, which appears to utilise some form of crazed Catch 22 to ensure that no matter whether an independent Scotland was stony broke or rolling in cash, it’d still end up skint.

We’ll give you a moment to guess who wrote it, and then we’re going to step through the piece line by line and see if we can figure out what sort of madness is afoot.

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Catastrophe! Scottish independence (surely “separation”?) will destroy your old-age pension, says yesterday’s Scottish Daily Express.

We suppose we better vote No to keep them safe, then.

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This is a thing that really just happened.

“Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher will have a statue erected in her honour in her home town of Grantham in Lincolnshire.

A plan to raise more than £200,000 for a statue and renovation project at the Grantham Museum has been unveiled.

Labour councillors had called for a town centre statue after the Conservative-majority authority voted against the move last week.“

Emphasis ours, because otherwise you’ll probably think you read it wrong.

An alert reader gives us advance notice that the BBC are planning a live online readers’-question-and-answer session with Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Something to coincide with the Scottish Lib Dem spring conference next week. Here’s the one we submitted – we feel sure the BBC will select it to ask him.

“Mr Rennie, do you think it’s conducive to a constructive debate to insultingly refer to people who disagree with you as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, as you did in response to the recent vote in favour of independence by a large branch of the postal-workers’ union which covered your own parliamentary region? Would it have been acceptable for Blair Jenkins or Nicola Sturgeon to dismiss all the Glasgow University students who voted No in their mock referendum as ‘daft wee kids who don’t know anything about life’?”

Why not send in yours too?

So what’s really going to happen to oil revenues in the next few years?

“An independent Scotland would begin with a £4 billion black hole in its finances due to a fall in oil revenues, UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said yesterday.” (The Scotsman, 2nd March 2013)

“”Oil production should revive from recent levels for a period of several years, particularly with the higher-price scenario, where the increase could be substantial,” the study by Alexander Kemp and Linda Stephen [of the University of Aberdeen] concluded.” (Reuters, 5th December 2012)

“Oil prices could rise to anywhere between $150 and $270 a barrel by 2020 as demand growth in emerging markets like India and China outpaces expected supply, the OECD said Wednesday.

“I think people have been calmer about oil prices given the new supply, but if you really look at the implications of rising demand, you see this isn’t true,” said Isabelle Koske, economist at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development and one author of a report on oil prices published Wednesday.” (The Wall Street Journal, 6th March 2013)

“Oil & Gas UK reckons oil receipts will be £3bn higher in 2017 than forecast last year. While Brent crude prices are now around $110 per barrel, by 2017, the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change predicts they could hit $130 a barrel, while the latest OECD predictions put them higher, at an eye-watering, record $150 a barrel.” (The Guardian, 7th March 2013)

We just can’t decide who the most reliable authority is. What a puzzle.

From the Luxembourg newspaper Wort.lu on Tuesday:

“Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister has backtracked on a comment about Scotland’s independence which was quoted in the British media, saying it was misinterpreted.“

From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

“The minister’s spokesman has made clear to the BBC that he has ‘no problems’ with our reporting of his remarks.” (column 3)

Hmm, that’s a tricky one.

The Scottish Sun Says, 7th March 2013:

“Here’s a radical idea for the Better Together campaign.

Just once, just for a change, let’s hear something positive about why Scotland would be better staying part of the United Kingdom. Because frankly, the scare stories are wearing a bit thin.

The latest is over a leaked SNP document that’s cue for a doom-laden warning about slashing pensions, cutting defence spending and shedding public sector jobs. Strip away the hysteria and what you actually have is a sensible Government prepared to make sensible decisions about spending. A Government aware they are operating in a tough economic climate where there is no bottomless pit of money.

And that’s whether you’re an independent country or part of the UK. Is there a single household in Scotland that doesn’t have similar conversations about what they can and can’t afford? It would be a shambolic Government that didn’t behave in the same responsible way.

Bear in mind, too, this document was written a year ago in different economic circumstances and that oil prices and revenues have risen. The net effect and the hard fact is that the finances of Scots are £863-a-head healthier than the rest of the UK.

Or isn’t that scary enough to tell folk?“

We think the Scotsman may finally have jumped the shark this morning. A piece by Scott Macnab (which we’re not going to link to, but have made a local copy of) on the No campaign’s year-old “decoy dossier” from yesterday is so extraordinarily, laughably biased and transparently dishonest that it couldn’t see even the most distant edges of decent, honourable journalism with the Hubble Space Telescope.

It is, however, just the most nakedly partisan of a series of Scottish newspaper headlines and lead stories this morning that once and for all give the lie to the notion that the country is served by anything remotely resembling a fair and balanced media.

We’ve spoken a few times of the “swarm of wasps” approach to large-scale lying that’s frequently deployed by the anti-independence movement. But this week’s desperate, co-ordinated, all-fronts onslaught on truth is more akin to a sudden mass infestation of hundreds of nasty, disease-ridden little bugs, trying to be too many to stamp on.

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(Title to be read in the style of the famous football chant.)

Independence supporters have a slight tendency to exaggerate the (nevertheless real) bias of the BBC. We couldn’t face watching Newsnight Scotland last night, but on catching up via the iPlayer this morning it was far less objectionable than many reports on Twitter had led us to believe.

What we’re a bit more concerned by is the Corporation’s growing rank incompetence.

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So, we’ve moved. We’ve done it a couple of hours early as it was getting VERY confusing with two versions of the site live at once and people posting to the new one even though we’d EXPRESSLY TOLD THEM NOT TO 😀

Unfortunately this does mean a small handful of comments have been lost, and may not be coming back. Sorry about that. (We took a backup of them in the hopes we might be able to somehow resurrect them from the XML, but we’re promising nothing.)

Anyway, this is WingsLand’s new home (new RSS feed here). It should hopefully be more stable than the old one, better able to cope with higher volumes of traffic, and more resistant to malicious attacks and threats. There MAY be the odd hiccup as we iron out wrinkles that don’t become apparent until you’re up and running, but hopefully not. If there are, please bear with us over the next 24 hours or so.

(We especially hope Google Analytics doesn’t get screwed up. We simply can’t tell you how impenetrable and horrible Google Analytics is, and if we live to be a billion we hope we never have to try to make it do anything again.)

One bonus is that a number of people who previously couldn’t access the site because work filters blocked it for having the word “game” in the address should no longer have problems. The old site will stay in place for the forseeable future so that people’s old links will still work, but will no longer be updated and comments will be closed.

But anyway, there it is. We’re here, we’re having a beer, get used to it.