It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.
So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.
Each bright new day brings a fresh game of Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline here at WingsLand Towers, but we were a bit thrown by this morning’s front page.
“Economists say indyref could drive investors away” is pure Magnus, but that four-word qualifier tacked on the end is a bit out of character. What could be going on?
Today’s editorial leader in Scotland on Sunday is really interesting, from a language nerd’s perspective (ie very much on our turf). Entitled “A warning to No campaign”, the column – nominally on the subject of pensions under devolution – purports to criticise said group, noting that “the Better Together campaign, by repeatedly presenting the idea of change as a threat, is doing Scotland no favours.”
But lurking just barely below the surface is an entirely different agenda.
A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.
(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)
A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.
There’s an intriguing interview in today’s Sunday Herald with ‘Better Together’ campaign director Blair McDougall (described by the paper as a “Labour apparatchik”), to mark the anniversary of the campaign’s launch. We recommend buying the paper – our digital copy costs just 69p from PressReader – and reading the whole thing, but if you’re pressed for time the last few paragraphs sum up the content pretty accurately.
And if you’re really in a rush, the last two sentences will do.
We’ve got quite the exclusive for you today, folks. We’re indebted to the alert civil servant who’s managed to smuggle out of Whitehall a copy of the UK government’s draft document of its inaugural greetings to the people of an independent Scotland, to be delivered (naturally) by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.
Given Mr Hague’s recent comments on how “baffling” the very notion of Scottish independence apparently was, readers may find the practical behind-the-scenes reality reassuring. You can read the speech in full below.
This is a genuine request for enlightenment, readers. Hopefully someone can help.
When we’re bored, we like to take a look at the Herald website front page and play Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline. It’s not usually too taxing a game – by way of illustration, we suspect you won’t have too much trouble with this example:
The actual story itself, though, has us bewildered.
Viewers watching the BBC and STV’s coverage of the Aberdeen Donside by-election last night will have noticed one particular pre-prepared script get repeated airings from Labour representatives. Kezia Dugdale on Newsnight Scotland, Anas Sarwar on Scotland Tonight and others at the count all spontaneously offered a list of SNP seats which would fall to Labour were the evening’s 9% swing to be repeated nationwide.
The interesting thing about the line, though, was how little it actually said. In the 2011 Holyrood election the SNP took 45% of the constituency vote to Labour’s 32%. Last night, despite the advantages of a by-election (traditionally used to register a protest vote), a 50% increase in the number of candidates contesting the seat and the loss of an MSP who was extremely personally popular in the constituency, the numbers were 42% and 33% respectively – a swing to Labour of just 2% in a little over two years.
On that schedule, Labour will surge back to power at Holyrood at the election of 2024.
One last snippet from “Road To Referendum” episode 3:
That’s Henry McLeish, former Labour First Minister and still (as far as we know) a firm advocate of a No vote. The comments seemed especially pertinent this week when the two competing parties in today’s Aberdeen Donside by-election both tweeted pictures from the local Aberdeen newspaper the Evening Express, quoting vox-pops with some of their respective voters.
We’ve noted a few times on this site that if you can judge a person by the company they keep, then the “Better Together” campaign would be an unsavoury character indeed. Backed enthusiastically by the likes of UKIP, the EDL/SDL, the BNP, the National Front and the Orange Order, it must be an uncomfortable place for Lib Dems and self-professed “internationalist socialists” within Labour to be living.
By contrast, the blackest sheep in the Yes family are a tiny handful of anonymous internet McGlashan sorts, daft and sometimes shouty but plainly harmless. We can’t recall any examples of Yes supporters being caught out giving Nazi salutes or calling for the forced repatriation of immigrants or the murder of Catholics, and you can be sure if there were any they’d have been all over every newspaper in the land.
So there’s a degree of irony in the newest recruit to the Unionist cause.
The concluding episode of STV’s “Road To Referendum” was almost a one-stop repository of some of the most compelling arguments for independence. Not because of anything in the show’s own script, nor even any of the interviews with the Yes camp, but rather the contributions of the Unionist side.
Whether it was Willie Rennie’s cluelessness, Jack McConnell’s revolting attempt to misrepresent the views of a dying international statesman, Michael Kelly’s reference to the Scots as “they” or Jim Murphy’s misplaced arrogant complacency, the programme showcased some of the least attractive aspects of the anti-independence movement.
The ugliest bug at the ball, though, was the UK’s Prime Minister.
Willie Rennie made a bit of an idiot of himself last night. He appeared towards the end of the final instalment of Iain Macwhirter’s largely-excellent STV documentary “Road To Referendum”, with the empirically wrong assertion (in the name of the fabled “positive case for the Union”) that “the National Health Service is a United Kingdom institution, it was created by United Kingdom people.”
This, as alert Wings Over Scotland readers will know in some detail, isn’t true. The NHS has never been a “United Kingdom institution”. From the first day of its creation, it was two independent institutions – the Scottish NHS and the English/Welsh NHS.
(It’s now four separate national bodies – Northern Ireland having its own service, with a different name and different responsibilities, and the Welsh NHS having been “divorced” from the English one and devolved to the Assembly in 1999.)
To the Scottish Lib Dem leader’s embarrassment, the NHS therefore proves the exact opposite of what he’s trying to use it to prove – namely, it shows that Scotland can deliver better health services for its people (free prescriptions, personal care, eye tests, dental check-ups, hospital parking) via independence, yet still co-operate smoothly and productively with the rUK where necessary without the sky falling in.
But Rennie’s clanger triggered off another interesting exchange.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
