Wings Over Scotland

We’ve already asked this question on Twitter (no answers yet), but we should open it up here too. In the light of today’s piece by Stewart Bremner, we’ve been racking our brains trying to think if anyone has moved, in public, from being a Yes vote to a No – or even a Don’t Know – since, let’s say, the SNP’s victory in 2007, the point at which a referendum started to become a real possibility rather than just an abstract concept.

That’s almost six years ago now. Surely SOMEONE must have been won over by the Unionists’ arguments or by the slick, positive, coherent “Better Together” campaign? There’s no shortage of testimonies from people moving, or at least edging, the other way. Even the Sunday Mail is starting to waver a little, for Heaven’s sake.

But we haven’t heard of a single, solitary human in all those six years of intensified constitutional debate who’d previously supported independence having announced to the world that it’s a bad idea and we’re better off in the bosom of Mother UK after all.

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Our story of this morning raised an interesting issue in the comments, namely whether sites like this one are actually helping to prop up the Scottish mainstream media by linking to its articles and thereby generating web traffic, page rankings and money for what is too often a toxic and dishonest propaganda tool for the Union.

For some time, readers have occasionally pointed this out to us and urged us not to help them, so that their deaths might be hastened. But here’s the conflict: we have no desire to destroy Scottish journalism, only to keep it honest.

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We’re indebted to an alert reader for pointing us towards this intriguing story:

“For knowingly selling paid links, The Scotsman and JP’s regional news sites were not removed from the search results – you can still find The Scotsman’s site if you perform a brand related navigational search. They have however, had their pagerank scores reduced drastically, and Google now trusts them less. The Scotsman’s pagerank dropped from 7 to 3, most of Johnston Press’ regional sites involved had their pagerank reduced to 0.

For the Scotsman website, this is a disaster. Dropping to a pagerank of 3 means that the search engine rankings they used to command for generic searches are gone – most likely for good. So – declining brand-led traffic and negligible Google search traffic for the foreseeable future. No new visitors from Google, and declining brand loyalty. The Scotsman website just became a very tough sell to any potential advertiser.”

Click the words for more details about how an increasingly discredited Scottish mainstream media is resorting to desperate measures to survive, then consider if you might want to fund more honest reporting, lest you be left with none at all.

Showbiz news from yesterday’s Daily Record:

“In a shameful confession that will shock their fans, cheeky TV duo Ant and Dec have admitted that one of them… voted Tory. The Geordie lads, back on ITV tonight on Saturday Night Takeaway, revealed all in a no-holds-barred interview in which they also said they’d taken drugs.

Asked about their political allegiances, the pair said they have both always voted Labour until the last election, when Ant voted Conservative for the first time. He told the Guardian’s Weekend magazine the decision would make his family in the North East of England “very angry”.

Ant said: “They certainly couldn’t give an argument for Labour for me at the moment – not a valid one. Then again, I’d struggle to give an argument for voting Conservative at the moment.””

It’s an understandable view.

A powerful reality check from Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald:

“Scotland bailed out the UK economy in the 1980s with Scottish oil revenues, and received precious little in return except factory closures and the highest mortality rates in Europe. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that any improvement in the UK economy is going to happen in London and the southeast, rather than in Scotland. Like the high-speed rail link, it might eventually extend to Manchester but no further. Scotland is on its own whether it likes it or not.”

We must admit, the “Red Paper Collective” – dragged up for a quote today by the Herald’s Magnus Gardham – was a new entity on us. A quick Google reveals that they seem to be a Labour Party offshoot, a fact Gardham unaccountably neglected to mention in his piece describing them merely as “trade union activists”.

So we perhaps shouldn’t waste too much time paying attention to their critical views about “Yes To A Just Scotland”, the document released by the official Yes campaign today. But one line does rather beg to be highlighted for the contempt in which the No campaign evidently holds the people of Scotland.

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The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:

“Blair Jenkins, the campaign’s chief executive, published [Yes To A Just Scotland] hours after suffering an embarrassing defeat in a mock referendum at Glasgow University, where students rejected independence by a margin of two to one.”

Actual result of referendum: 62-38, a margin of 1.6/1.

Size of Mr Johnson’s casual exaggeration: 25%. (1.6 x 1.25 = 2)

But seriously, though – what is it about believing in the Union that apparently renders educated people suddenly unable to count? We have no idea, but it may go some way to explaining the UK’s credit-rating downgrade.

Last year (24 June 2012, to be precise):

“Homeowners could face a £1 billion rise in mortgage payments in an independent Scotland, Treasury axeman Danny Alexander has warned.

The world’s leading credit rating agencies earlier this year warned Scotland would not be guaranteed the UK’s AAA borrowing status.”

This year:

“The UK has lost its top AAA credit rating for the first time since 1978 on expectations that growth will ‘remain sluggish over the next few years’.

The ratings agency Moody’s became the first to cut the UK from its highest rating, to Aa1. Moody’s said that the government’s debt reduction programme faced significant ‘challenges’ ahead.”

Nice to know we didn’t have to wait for independence, eh?

Today’s press is full of reports on the Glasgow University independence referendum, in which the vote went 62-38 against on a turnout variously reported as 11%, 12% and 13%. (To our considerable surprise, this dismal level of interest was in fact regarded as a triumph, and vastly above the usual amount of engagement with student politics.)

Fewer than 2,600 people voted – despite the ballot being held somewhere students had to go anyway – so the results are barely as authoritative as a typical opinion poll. They do suggest a couple of reasonably interesting things, though.

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This sort of thing does seem to be happening with disturbing frequency at the august offices of the Scotsman these days. Yesterday’s paper ran a story under the stark headline “EU budget cuts ‘will favour the English’, says SNP”.

[EDIT: Also spun into a truly vile column by Michael Kelly today.]

You’ve been playing this game a while now, readers. See if you can guess which words from the headline don’t actually appear anywhere in the story.

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This is the text of yesterday’s radio interview between BBC Scotland’s Glenn Campbell and Lord Malloch-Brown, the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations who also served as a Foreign Office minister in the last UK Labour government. It seems reasonable to suggest that (a) he’s not a rabid SNP stooge, and (b) he’s a pretty good authority on how Europe works.

The interview starts with the response to a question we don’t get to hear, and we’ve excised a few “um”s, “you know”s and “I mean”s for readability. All emphasis is ours. The transcript is otherwise verbatim.

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A realistic, informed and expert assessment of an independent Scotland’s relationship with Europe was accidentally reported by the BBC this morning. It’s chilly here today so we’re going to have to warm up our transcribing fingers for those who can’t access streams, but in the meantime the rest of you can listen to the audio.