Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been wiping tears of laughter from our eyes most of this morning, after reading one of the most magnificently bare-faced and audacious pieces of black-is-white lying we think we might ever have seen printed with a straight face in a British newspaper.

It appears in the Telegraph, which seems to have positioned itself latterly as the Daily Sport for people with a reading age above seven, and makes the mindboggling claim that “Contrary to its media image, the campaign to save the United Kingdom says it has more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents”.

In fairness, it doesn’t actually say whether these boots have any feet in them.

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Monday:

“On the basis of independent analysis, the UK Government has estimated that an average annual mortgage payment in Scotland could increase by £1,700.”

(UK government “factsheet” issued by the Scotland Office.)

Wednesday:

“For the average mortgage in Scotland, there would be £5,400 more [in] mortgage payments a year.”

(George Osborne to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee.)

Yikes! What the hell happened on Tuesday?

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We’re so used to reading doom-and-gloom predictions about the apocalyptic future that would await an independent Scotland, readers, that to our shame we occasionally fall foul of a trap we never stop warning you about – reading the headline of a story and not paying attention to the words below.

The one above is a case in point.

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The Scotsman, 24 March 2007:

“Brown: I will save the union

Gordon Brown last night revealed he was placing himself at the heart of Labour’s Holyrood election campaign, declaring it was his ‘duty’ to save the Union from the SNP.

In an exclusive interview with Scotland on Sunday, Brown pledged to spend the six weeks before polling day ‘explaining and exposing’ the Nationalists’ ‘disastrous’ plans.

The Chancellor ruled out any plans to give more power to the Scottish Parliament saying it was not necessary.”

How (some) things change, eh readers?

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This morning’s Daily Mail reports that Alistair Darling has been “sidelined” by the No campaign, with Douglas Alexander drafted into his place. We’ve remarked previously on this site about our bemusement over the reverence with which Mr Alexander’s intellect is regarded by the Scottish media, and we’re none the wiser after this:

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Alert readers will have noticed that we’ve been studying the UK government’s latest independence paper today. The 24-page booklet comes with a foreword from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth promising that it contains “the positive case for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom”, so we thought it’d be fun to share some of our favourite snippets of positivity.

We could do with some cheering up.

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This morning’s Sunday Herald carries a typically sour and sneery quote from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall in response to a Yes Scotland release of financial data relating to its campaign funding:

“No-one would criticise the Weirs, who are ­longstanding SNP supporters. However, it is extraordinary that compared to the tens of thousands of small donations received by Better Together, almost 80% of Yes Scotland’s money comes from one source.

We now know why they have been hiding their donations for so long.”

Firstly, of course, he might want to revise that opening sentence, since his campaign’s representative Alex Johnstone MSP seems quite unable to stop criticising the Weirs, repeatedly painting them as gullible and dishonest dupes of the evil Alex Salmond.

But as usual, Mr McDougall’s obnoxious bluster also conceals a cynical misdirection.

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.

Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.

Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?

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The Times sells a paltry 18,155 copies a day in Scotland, and its website is locked behind the most expensive paywall of any publication that we know of, so not many people will read its Scottish stories in their original location.

Of course, we’re sure anything important would be prominently featured across the rest of the media just like yesterday’s big pensions news was, so there would be no need to reproduce the whole thing here.

Still, better safe than sorry, eh?

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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One of the most insidious aspects of the Unionist and media attack on independence is the constant refrain of “Scotland will be poorer after independence, so there will have to be cuts to services or tax increases. Cuts or tax rises. Cuts or tax rises. If you vote Yes, do you want CUTS OR TAX RISES?”

Of late, it’s often been used as a corollary of a new plea: “Oh, it’s not that we’re against independence, but why won’t Alex Salmond admit that there will be downsides? Why won’t he be honest about the risks and challenges? If only he’d admit that it won’t be a land of milk and honey we might listen.”

While its prevalence is new, the actual line is a tired old straw man – neither the First Minister nor the wider Yes campaign has EVER pretended Scotland would suddenly enter a fairytale utopia where everything was perfect and cash flowed from taps.

But for the avoidance of doubt, as advocates of a Yes vote, let’s put something on the record in black and white: There Will Be Cuts.

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