Wings Over Scotland

There’s a strange phenomenon at the heart of Scottish politics, and it runs far deeper than the independence referendum. It’s summed up pretty well in this image.

The picture and the comment alongside come from the Facebook page of Labour’s newest Parliamentary candidate, Kathy Wiles. They were made more than two months ago, so you’d imagine that any selection committee worth even a quarter of a damn would have checked her out enough to have a look at her social-media accounts and see if she might have said – or be likely to say in future – anything stupid.

But the thing is, we’re sure they did. Because as far as Scottish Labour as concerned, calling “most” of the voters of the most popular party in the country a bunch of workshy scroungers only interested in claiming benefits isn’t even a gaffe. It’s pretty much the official policy position.

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One of the features of the independence debate as covered by the Scottish and UK media has been the casual lie. We’re not talking about screaming banner front-page headlines here, but the passing, offhand untruths slipped into articles that are primarily about something else, or tiny little corner-of-a-page pieces so trivial that readers absorb the falsehood in seconds and move on.

We covered a good example of the latter last week, and it’s repeated in this morning’s Times, in a piece which makes the flatly and diametrically untrue assertion that “experts” have “produced figures suggesting that the final cost [of setting up an independent Scotland] could be £1.5 billion”, when the reality is that the only expert who has produced figures has explicitly rubbished that number.

But it’s another article in the same paper that made us smile wryly.

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It seems somehow fitting that there was a political battle in Stirling yesterday. The city was host to two sets of military-themed festivities, with the UK government having decided to hold Armed Forces Day there in a move transparently aimed at wrecking the commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn.

The anniversary was obviously on an immovable date and location, but the Labour-Tory coalition that runs Stirling Council, and which last year attempted to replace a Saltire which flies over the statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce with a Union Jack – a plan it abandoned after it was highlighted by this site – agreed to host the competing festival on the same weekend.

Armed Forces Day had free admission to undermine the relatively pricey Bannockburn event. Labour even went so far as to actively try to put people off attending the latter, with Glasgow MP Ian Davidson suggesting that the commemoration was nothing more than a glorification of “the murder of hundreds of thousands of English people”. (These particular “people” being an invading army, actual English casualties around 10,000.)

The press covered the subsequent downsizing of the historical recreation with glee, with numerous articles reporting low ticket sales and other problems right up to the eve of the show, which appeared about to be a major flop.

But then something odd happened.

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Last week the Press & Journal carried a story about a debate held at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre, attended by just over 150 company directors, senior managers and other “business leaders”. The debate was between John Swinney and Danny Alexander (with contributions from Professor David Bell and businesswoman Christine O’Neill), followed by a poll carried out among the audience.

The No-friendly headline figures – which will come of no surprise to anyone who has ever read the Press & Journal – said 68% of the audience would be voting No at the end of the debate, with 16% Yes and 15% still unsure (1 person said they wouldn’t be voting. Maybe they walked into the wrong room at the start or something.)

That sounds like a pretty comprehensive win for No, so we should probably all just pack up our stuff and concede defeat.

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Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the London School of Economics, a man with absolutely no dog in the Scottish independence fight, has now published his detailed assessment of the set-up costs of an independent Scotland.

He puts the actual additional cost – that is, what Scotland would have to spend that it wouldn’t have to spend anyway if it stayed in the UK – at around £200m. That’s the total, not every year, and is somewhat below the UK government’s own “estimate” of £2.7bn, issued just three weeks ago to widespread derision.

For comparison purposes that’s very roughly what Scotland spends on the upkeep of Trident nuclear submarines every year (our share of the £2.24bn annual cost), but as the Unionist parties constantly complain that Scotland’s savings on Trident get spent several times over by Yes supporters, we thought we’d come up with an alternative.

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We suppose, then, that we’d better deal with the UK government’s bizarre propaganda booklet that’s about to slither through every letterbox in Scotland at taxpayers’ expense whether they like it or not. We’ve been having some fun with the cover image in the last couple of days, but astonishingly enough this is the real version:

To be honest, readers, we’re still kind of rubbing our eyes in disbelief at that one. But the McTrapp Family above (who are these implausibly happy children? Where, who or what are they running from? Are they trespassing? Where are their parents?) aren’t even nearly the weirdest thing about the pamphlet.

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In the course of debunking some No-camp myths about “high taxes” and the cost of living in Scandinavian countries, we’ve often mentioned that in addition to average real incomes being far higher in places like Norway and Denmark (even after adjusting for the cost of living), that average is itself misleading, because the poor distribution of wealth in the UK means that it’s artificially inflated by the incomes of the super-rich.

Now it’s possible to actually put figures on that.

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This morning’s papers report that Labour, the Tories and a small fringe party whose name has slipped our minds for a moment will this week release a statement about their shared commitment to further devolution of powers to Holyrood after a No vote.

We’re sure that Scotland’s journalists are all on top of the situation as usual and will put the statement under microscope-like scrutiny, but just in case, we have a tip.

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The story in yesterday’s Scotsman carrying outrageous and defamatory slurs against me has today vanished from its website. There’s nothing by way of an apology or correction in the paper’s usual page 2 corrections column, however, and there’s been no reply to either my email of yesterday morning or the letter our solicitor sent yesterday afternoon. Be assured, readers, that the matter won’t rest there.

But today things are even more interesting.

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Alert readers will have had a hard time missing Labour spin doctor John McTernan on TV and radio and in newspapers this week. A former special adviser to Tony Blair, he’s been rolled out on heavy rotation across the media to pontificate on Campbell Gunn’s minor briefing error (which was swiftly apologised for) about frontline Labour activist Clare Lally, and to strenuously insist to anyone who’ll listen that abusive “cybernats” are co-ordinated and controlled by the SNP.

Anyone who’s followed Scottish (or, indeed, Australian) politics for any length of time will have been rubbing their eyes and syringing their ears in surprise at Mr McTernan being invited to cast aspersions on anyone else’s morals and ethics. Anyone who hasn’t might want to bring themselves up to speed.

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We spent much of yesterday evening trying to actually track down the “vicious barrage” of vile cybernat abuse that Labour and “Better Together” activist Clare Lally says she was subjected to after being revealed to be rather less of an “ordinary” member of the public than the No camp presented her as at its recent Glasgow rally, and which has received wall-to-wall media coverage.

As yet, we’ve drawn a blank. We’ve made repeated requests, some to people who’ve contacted us angrily claiming to be her friends or family members, for evidence of any abusive comments at all. All have been met with an abrupt outbreak of silence.

Scotland 2014 devoted almost its entire 30-minute show to the issue last night. To depict the terrible onslaught, the above tweets were all they could come up with. The entire affair, readers might feel, is starting to smell distinctly piscine.

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The New Statesman has been doggedly ignoring all our polite requests to release the audio of its controversial interview with Alistair Darling for several days now, but today it very quietly released the full text of it on its website.

Where previously it had reported the “Better Together” leader as having made an “inaudible mumble” in response to a question about whether the SNP were guilty of “blood-and-soil nationalism”, apparently the mag had given its ears a good swabbing out with a cotton-bud and concluded that it HAD been able to hear him after all.

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