Wings Over Scotland

Because this is how a state broadcaster does balanced, impartial reporting.

Now some revision notes to help you.

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Just magnificent work from the Daily Mail today.

Really only a couple of tiny quibbles.

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Today has seen the entry into the independence debate of the magnificently batty Vote No Borders campaign group – not on any account to be confused with the No Borders campaign group, whose aims are to “struggle against borders and immigration controls and strive for freedom of movement for all” and are therefore the very antithesis of what the British state has increasingly come to stand for.

Various puff pieces in the media have given the group free space to advertise themselves as a “grassroots” campaign that is non-party political. But the funding figures mentioned – £150,000 raised before the group had any kind of public profile at all and hope of raising another £250,000 on top – may well cause more cynical readers to detect a somewhat piscine odour.

As we’ve got our journalism hats on, let’s have a sniff.

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Yesterday, we discovered a rather curious anti-independence “listicle” on the popular viral-meme website Buzzfeed. Entitled “Scotland. The UK. 10 Myths. 10 Facts.”, it describes itself as “myth busting” by an author identified only as “YouDecide2014”.

It was shared or retweeted by a variety of Conservative Party special advisers, the 10 Downing Street Facebook account, and even the UK Ministry of Defence.

The crude, extremely biased article gives no indication that it’s written by the UK government. The closest it comes to doing so is right at the end, where it says “Get the facts at www.gov.uk/scottishreferendum“. The Buzzfeed account page makes no reference to the UK government, and the layout makes the piece look like any normal article on the site, although in fact it’s posted on Buzzfeed Community, which is an area where users can post anything they want to without censorship.

We decided to find out more.

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The Scottish independence debate is characterised by so many gigantic lies from the No camp and the media (no pound, international outcast, bankrupt, cataclysm, etc etc) that there’s rarely time to pick up on all the small, casual, offhand ones that also litter the news-stands and the airwaves and poison any hope of intelligent discourse.

So let’s make an effort with one, just by way of example.

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I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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Alert readers will be aware that this site spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out how few and how trivial are the actual political differences between the three UK parties. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all basically offer slightly tweaked and rebadged versions of the same centre-right policies, in an unhealthy consensus set in concrete by the UK’s undemocratic electoral system.

There does, however, remain one major issue on which there’s still clear blue water between the only two parties who might provide the next UK Prime Minister, and it’s one that’s a lot more important to the independence debate than is generally thought. Have you guessed what it is yet?

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Yesterday, Ed Miliband came to Scotland to yet again trot out the Unionist mantra that an independent Scotland would result in a “race to the bottom” between it and the rUK over Corporation Tax (and to marvel that no interviewer ever pulls him up on the fact that Labour cut the tax twice the last time they were in power and promised to cut it further as soon as they could).

We thought it would be interesting to see if that might be true.

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We suppose we have to credit “Better Together” with SOME intelligence after all. It seems they’ve finally and belatedly learned that Tory ministers coming up and lecturing Scotland is a counter-productive business, so this week they sent Gordon Brown in to do Iain Duncan Smith’s dirty work for him, by issuing dire warnings about the cost of welfare in an independent Scotland using figures helpfully fed to him by IDS’s Department for Work and Pensions.

But the UK government also released, with rather less fanfare, some other figures about pensions this week that didn’t reflect quite as well on the Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister.

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If you’re a politician in Scotland and you want to do something with the smallest possible amount of scrutiny, Friday is the day you choose. Neither of the major nightly current-affairs shows have Friday editions (we’re actually not entirely sure why that is), so unless you make a REAL mess of something you can be sure the news agenda will have moved on by the time Monday rolls around.

We suspect that the CBI’s mind-boggling decision to abandon its position of being part of the official No campaign falls firmly into that category and will be pretty thoroughly chewed over in the next couple of days (despite them doing their very best to bury it by announcing it at six o’clock on a Friday evening), so we’re going to stick to our original plan and talk about Ed Miliband instead.

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We read yesterday how Labour and the Tories have both, in rather different ways, been expressing their concern about the demographic timebomb that will affect Scotland unless it can attract a major increase in immigration.

“An independent Scotland would need almost one million immigrants by the middle of the century to boost the workforce and defuse its pensions time bomb, [Labour shadow pensions spokesman Gregg McClymont] has warned.”

And just a few months earlier:

“Economists believe the population needs to grow by 24,000 people a year just to keep pace with European economies. Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: ‘A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base. That is absolutely essential for the economy.”

So we’d imagine that’s always been the Labour and Tory policy, right?

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Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.

The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.

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