Wings Over Scotland

It’s gone midnight and we don’t normally do speculation, but as it’s already showing up in our incoming searches we’ve spent the last little while trying to work out what’s gone on between SNP MP Angus Robertson, Labour MP John Mann and the Herald in the last 24 hours. So first let’s establish the known facts, then have the attempted deduction, and hopefully by the morning read the official clarifications.

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We recently received the same letter from the Radio Times as many other people did, in response to our complaint about the magazine’s misrepresentation of respected Scottish historian Dr Fiona Watson last month. The problem related to an article about the film “Braveheart”, which made some deeply unpleasant implications easily read as saying the SNP were xenophobic racists encouraging anti-English violence.

The reply didn’t address the very specific issues we’d raised about what Dr Watson did or didn’t say, so we wrote back to the mag’s editor Ben Preston seeking clarification on a couple of important points. His reply is below.

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We’ve been documenting of late how the No campaign has grown increasingly negative and smear-based since the turn of the year, as opinion polls show a trend of small but consistent movement towards independence. One of the core characteristics of negative political campaigning is to accuse your opponents of doing the thing you’re actually doing, and the last couple of days have thrown up some striking examples.

That’s our old pal Euan McColm of the Scotsman, of course. And he’s not alone.

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Ian Taylor, chief executive and president of Vitol, is the donor who just keeps on giving:

“Oil market dealers confirmed on Friday that a Syrian government tender on behalf of state oil company Sytrol for gasoline that closed on the market this week has been picked up by giant oil traders Trafigura and Vitol. Syria exports crude oil, but does not have the refining capacity to meet its domestic needs and relies on petrol imports.

On the same day US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time called for an international boycott of Syrian oil and gas products, and sanctions against its oil and gas industries as the best way of putting pressure on the regime to stop its murderous repression of protests there which began on March 15th and have cost upwards of 1700 lives.”

(Our emphasis, as usual.) To be honest, we hope “Better Together” don’t hand back Mr Taylor’s £500,000 donation. We imagine Yes Scotland will rather enjoy hitting them with this particular oil- and blood-soaked stick all the way to September 2014.

We haven’t heard any more from Ian Taylor’s lawyers yet. But in a surprising development never previously observed on the internet, his attempt to silence various pro-independence voices appears to have resulted in people digging deeper into the affairs of Vitol, the oil-trading company of which he’s been Chief Executive since 1995.

One particularly interesting revelation that we don’t think was covered in any of the earlier articles relates to the company’s conduct in the Republic of the Congo, where they got up to shenanigans a little shadier than simply drinking all the Um Bongo.

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It seems odd to talk of the anti-independence campaign being “desperate” when most polls still give them a significant lead. But to any rational observer the tone of the debate has changed noticeably since the turn of 2013, culminating in the extraordinary and hysterical outburst on the “Better Together” website this week [local copy] when challenged on what we’ll call the “colourful past” of its chief donor Ian Taylor, lest we get any more badly-spelled letters from his lawyers.

(This humble wee website has seen a quite dramatic increase in malicious targeting of various kinds in recent weeks, from legal threats to disgusting personal smearing from No activists and various forms of “cyber warfare”.)

And when you see what the Scotsman’s been reduced to making one of its lead stories this morning, the weight of evidence for the growing state of panic in the No camp becomes hard to ignore.

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This is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall looking comfortable and confident on last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight as the recently-controversial subject of campaign donations was discussed.

Not for the first time, his comments seemed a little at odds with the truth.

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There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.

But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.

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We’ve noted a few times in the past that one of the challenges of highlighting media bias is that you rarely get a chance to directly compare like with like. If a Labour MP is caught up in some sort of scandal and the media soft-pedal it, say, it’s all very well claiming “It’d be different if this was someone in the SNP”, but unless the latter does the exact same thing it’s hard to make it stick.

So this week presents a rare opportunity to study the phenomenon in the flesh, as both the Yes and No campaigns release their lists of campaign contributions so far. Let’s see how it went.

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We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.

Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.

We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:

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Attentive readers will of course recall the shocking revelations from the No campaign earlier this year about the terrifying cost of independence to Scots – £1 a head. But what’s the latest info on the price of staying in the UK?

“The [Institute for Fiscal Studies] data shows that a couple with children, where one parent works, will be worse off by £3,995.65 a year on average after the tax and benefit changes introduced since 2010. Average households will be worse off by £891 a year.”

£1 for independence or £891 for the Union? Tough call.

As we browsed the print edition of the Daily Record today to compare its coverage of the latest independence referendum donations news with the online version (with particular regard to Kevin McKidd), we spotted something else curious.

We’ve already noted a curious hypocrisy in the Scotsman’s reporting of the same issue this morning, where it pointedly questioned whether the SNP had handed over some sizeable donations to the party to the Yes campaign, while allowing Blair McDougall to make a virtue out of the fact that Labour and the Conservatives hadn’t transferred party funds to the No campaign. But the Record’s arithmetic is even more confused than the Scotsman’s logic.

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