Wings Over Scotland

Veteran readers of this site will know how hard it is to nail Scottish Labour down on a policy for just about anything. So when we suggested earlier today that the party DID have a (sort of) firm policy on something – namely calling on the Scottish Government to bring forward legislation to stop people being evicted over bedroom-tax arrears – we probably shouldn’t have been surprised to be contacted within minutes by a Scottish Labour press officer angrily insisting that it didn’t.

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For the seasoned political analyst (and also for idiots like us), it can be hard to offer a rational explanation for why any thinking human being would ever believe a word the Labour Party says about anything any more.

It came to power 16 years ago promising to introduce electoral reform, then ditched it. (But still hilariously claims to be committed to the principle despite 100 years of failing to deliver it.) It also pledged not to introduce university tuition fees, then introduced them. It campaigned for re-election on a promise not to increase them, then increased them. It – well, we could go on all day, just about tuition fees alone.

But let’s cut to the chase and move up to the present day.

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A lot of independence supporters are getting excited today about this clip of Labour shadow-cabinet MP Helen Goodman telling the BBC that Labour would keep the bedroom tax. They’re right to highlight it, but most are doing so for the wrong reasons.

Goodman’s position is that Labour WOULD still implement the hated tax, but would only penalise people for over-occupying their housing if they’d been offered smaller accommodation and refused to move. Opponents of Labour are observing the hypocrisy of the party raging against the tax in public while admitting they’d retain it, which is fair enough, but also misses the real point.

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As we’ve mentioned before, it really has been a revelation to discover that the Daily Record’s iPad app – which gives you the entire printed paper, not just the selection of stories that reach the Record website – is free on weekdays. Today, for example, it brought us a large not-online Page 2 piece on former Tory cabinet minister Liam Fox’s idiotic hardline policy suggestions for the party, which were expertly ridiculed by Conservative commentator Alex Massie yesterday.

Thanks to Mr Massie’s splendid work, there’s no need for us to bother with Fox’s comments. What we noticed instead was the Record’s analysis of them.

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It’s nice to see Scottish Labour taking turns. Today it’s Richard Baker who’s been wheeled out to spout idiotic and instantly-disproveable untruths at the Scottish public.

Shall we?

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When the Daily Record lost Magnus Gardham to the Herald, they made sure to call on a like-for-like replacement. Torcuil Crichton, the newspaper’s self-styled “man in Westminster” (and who has never approved a single comment on his political blog in almost five years), is Gardham’s only rival as the most virulently and overtly Unionist staff reporter – as opposed to opinion columnist – in the Scottish media.

A story under Mr Crichton’s name today, though, is unsubtle even by his standards.

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Power Of Scotland is a newspaper about the power industry, given away as a business supplement with The Times. An alert contributor pointed us to an intriguing article in the latest edition from regular Scotsman columnist Peter Jones, offering a more nuanced account of the industry’s view of independence than you might expect.

If you’re pressed for time we’ve pulled out a couple of the more interesting passages.

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It’s weird watching the Sunday papers all decrying the media’s handling of Wednesday’s leaked Scottish Government document. Everyone seems to agree that the Cabinet paper wasn’t any kind of smoking gun – the consensus is that John Swinney’s comments were sensible, cautious and largely misrepresented in the press.

Eddie Barnes in Scotland on Sunday, for example, noted that “Few of the issues presented within the report were in any way revelatory” (though it didn’t stop him from referring to them as “revelations” later in the piece anyway), but then diffidently observed that they “produced a disastrous set of headlines”, as if his own publication hadn’t written any of them, and as if it wasn’t continuing to do so on the very same day Barnes’ piece hit the newsstands.

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Poe’s Law, which we only discovered on Wikipedia this morning, says that “without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism”. Or in other words, there’s a name for when people are so batshit crazy you can’t satirise them, because you simply couldn’t invent anything madder than what they say for real.

It’s in that context we invite readers to consider a recent story in the Scottish Sun.

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We’ve just had to have a bit of a sit down after trying in vain to get our heads around the dizzying spin deployed in a story in this morning’s Herald, which appears to utilise some form of crazed Catch 22 to ensure that no matter whether an independent Scotland was stony broke or rolling in cash, it’d still end up skint.

We’ll give you a moment to guess who wrote it, and then we’re going to step through the piece line by line and see if we can figure out what sort of madness is afoot.

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So what’s really going to happen to oil revenues in the next few years?

“An independent Scotland would begin with a £4 billion black hole in its finances due to a fall in oil revenues, UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said yesterday.” (The Scotsman, 2nd March 2013)

“”Oil production should revive from recent levels for a period of several years, particularly with the higher-price scenario, where the increase could be substantial,” the study by Alexander Kemp and Linda Stephen [of the University of Aberdeen] concluded.” (Reuters, 5th December 2012)

“Oil prices could rise to anywhere between $150 and $270 a barrel by 2020 as demand growth in emerging markets like India and China outpaces expected supply, the OECD said Wednesday.

“I think people have been calmer about oil prices given the new supply, but if you really look at the implications of rising demand, you see this isn’t true,” said Isabelle Koske, economist at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development and one author of a report on oil prices published Wednesday.” (The Wall Street Journal, 6th March 2013)

“Oil & Gas UK reckons oil receipts will be £3bn higher in 2017 than forecast last year. While Brent crude prices are now around $110 per barrel, by 2017, the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change predicts they could hit $130 a barrel, while the latest OECD predictions put them higher, at an eye-watering, record $150 a barrel.” (The Guardian, 7th March 2013)

We just can’t decide who the most reliable authority is. What a puzzle.

We think the Scotsman may finally have jumped the shark this morning. A piece by Scott Macnab (which we’re not going to link to, but have made a local copy of) on the No campaign’s year-old “decoy dossier” from yesterday is so extraordinarily, laughably biased and transparently dishonest that it couldn’t see even the most distant edges of decent, honourable journalism with the Hubble Space Telescope.

It is, however, just the most nakedly partisan of a series of Scottish newspaper headlines and lead stories this morning that once and for all give the lie to the notion that the country is served by anything remotely resembling a fair and balanced media.

We’ve spoken a few times of the “swarm of wasps” approach to large-scale lying that’s frequently deployed by the anti-independence movement. But this week’s desperate, co-ordinated, all-fronts onslaught on truth is more akin to a sudden mass infestation of hundreds of nasty, disease-ridden little bugs, trying to be too many to stamp on.

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