Wings Over Scotland

The devil, they say, is in the detail, and that certainly seems to apply to the UK Government’s first paper on the consequences of Scottish independence. With remarkably little fanfare, the coalition appears to have dropped an atomic bomb into the heart of the constitutional debate, and not even realised it.

The core premise of the document appears to be the counter-intuitive idea that the UK can have it both ways – it can insist that an independent Scotland would be a brand-new nation with no rights to any of the shared property of the UK, but that it would somehow simultaneously be responsible for its full share of the UK’s liabilities. Michael Moore is quoted saying precisely that in today’s Herald.

The justification for this outwardly-absurd claim rests on an astonishing assertion lurking unassumingly in a series of paragraphs in the middle of the paper. We’ve copied it below and highlighted a couple of the relevant phrases.

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There will be uncountable acres of newsprint expended on analysing the UK Government’s paper released today on the implications of Scottish independence for EU membership. If you’re in a hurry, though, the entire document is comprehensively and accurately summed up in these two paragraphs from Part V, Section (3):

Even shorter version: if the EU wants us in automatically (something which is plainly in absolutely everyone’s interests, including the rUK’s), then we’ll be in automatically, no matter what the small print says. And that’s that.

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Recently we’ve mentioned a concept we called the “invisible hypothetical”. It refers to a form of media bias characterised by omission, and which is therefore hard to prove. This morning’s edition of the Scotsman carries a conveniently striking example.

Taken solely on its own merits, the article below the headline is impossible to fault. It notes the figure claimed today by the UK Government for the number of treaties an independent Scotland would be required to (at least theoretically) renegotiate, and even refers – obliquely and neutrally – to the previously-cited figure of 14,000.

In that oblique neutrality, of course, lies the rub.

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The Telegraph’s crotchety old relic Alan Cochrane is usually a figure of comic fun for independence supporters. But now and again the Tory dinosaur’s prehistoric polemic conceals something more dangerous. In a misguided attempt to add hard numbers to a piece yesterday reporting Teresa May’s speech about spies, Cochrane seems to have used Wikipedia for some information on Swedish and Danish domestic intelligence services and come up with this:

“For instance, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, which is part of the country’s police force, has 650 officers. Sweden, which is not a member of Nato, has over 1,000 officers in its security, counter terrorism and intelligence service – SAPO – which has an annual budget, according to one estimate, of £800 million.”

“According to one estimate”? That’s an interesting choice of words. Unfortunately someone wasn’t reading closely enough. Wikipedia’s English-language page on Säpo does indeed say that it had a budget of around 800m in 2008. Except it wasn’t £800m, but 800 million Swedish Kronor. At today’s exchange rate that’s around £80 million. Mr Cochrane has, in his fury, overstated Sweden’s intelligence budget by 1,000%. Oops.

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What IS going on at the Herald? Yesterday we highlighted a bizarre article which flatly contradicted its own headline, then agreed with it, then contradicted it again. And today another piece by the same author appears to do much the same thing.

At least the headline is a bit more circumspect this time: “Uncertainty claims over EU situation”. But the opening paragraph blares a dramatic statement which doesn’t appear to be supported anywhere in the story.

“The Scottish Government has indicated for the first time that Scotland would not automatically be able to negotiate EU membership from within the organisation if Scots vote Yes in next year’s referendum.”

…is the bold-fonted proclamation from the paper’s Political Editor. But if you read the text which follows it, you’ll struggle to locate anyone indicating any such thing.

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We checked with a few people on this one to make sure it wasn’t just us. Today’s Herald carries a story – by Magnus Gardham, no less – that on first glance sounds like good news for supporters of independence. But on closer inspection, it’s an incoherent jumble of word-noise that contradicts itself almost every paragraph. We honestly don’t have a clue what they’re up to over there.

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We’re not going to link to the Brian Wilson article which the Guardian unaccountably lowered itself to publishing yesterday. It’s embarrassing to see a still-widely-respected newspaper debasing its pages with the sort of swivel-eyed ranting you’d normally expect from a drunk shouting at a skip at 7am, which we can only assume the paper paid money for after LabourHame rejected it as being just too bitter and deranged.

One ugly little piece of innuendo is worth picking up on, though. With what’s the closest thing to subtlety in the piece, Wilson grudgingly concedes the SNP’s mandate to hold an independence referendum:

“The difference is that Scotland now has to answer a question which only a minority want to ask: ‘Should Scotland become an independent country?’ This is because, two years ago, 21% of Scots voted nationalist in the Holyrood elections, giving them an overall majority.”

Even in that tiny snippet there are several nasty little lies (nobody voted “nationalist”, for example – they voted for the SNP, which stands for Scottish National Party rather than Nationalist, and many did so despite opposing independence, just as tens of thousands of “nationalists” voted for other parties). But we’ll focus on the “21%” thing.

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FAO John McCormick

Dear Mr McCormick,

Last week you were widely quoted in the press on the subject of voters being informed in advance by both parties in the independence debate of the repercussions of their respective positions winning the vote. For example, your press release stated:

“The Commission has therefore recommended that the UK and Scottish Governments should clarify what process will follow the referendum, for either outcome, so that people have that information before they vote.”

Although your words seem clear to me, they seem not to have been understood by the No campaign. Ruth Davidson and Alistair Darling, for example, have both in recent days indicated their refusal to detail any proposed new devolution settlement, should Scotland reject independence, until AFTER the referendum.

Ms Davidson went so far as to suggest in one TV interview that she thought your comments meant people were unsure whether there would still be a UK Prime Minister after a No vote, and whether UK laws would still apply. As it appears extremely obvious that the “default” position in the event of a No vote would be that everything stayed the same as it is now, it seems unlikely that those were in fact the questions your respondents were asking.

But as we were not privy to your testing, we don’t know specifically which information voters were requesting be made available to them. I wonder, then, if it might be possible for you to issue some clarification on the matter, at least in broad terms.

A great many members of both the UK and Scottish Parliaments were extremely vociferous before the publication of your report in insisting that its recommendations be followed in full by all sides. It would perhaps therefore be valuable if you could be more specific about what sort of information your quote above referred to.

Thanking you in advance,

Rev. Stuart Campbell

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One of the main reasons we started Wings Over Scotland 15 months ago was a recurring frustration at the Scottish media’s constant failure to represent our views. Time after time we’d sit watching the TV with our blood pressure rising, shouting “Why aren’t you asking this CLEARLY lying idiot the staggeringly bloody obvious question that anyone with a IQ higher than a badger’s bawbag would be asking?” at the screen until the neighbours started banging on the wall again.

We’ve come a long way in 15 months, and we can at least now draw a sizeable audience’s attention to such unasked questions. But the phenomenon hasn’t lessened any, and last night’s Newsnight Scotland provided a textbook example.

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We know the No campaign is dead set against entering any discussions before the independence referendum, but we were so moved by Willie Rennie’s concern today about Scotland not having enough time to “negotiate over 14,000 international treaties“ in the 16 months between a Yes vote and the first elections to an independent Holyrood that we thought we’d help him out a bit with some advance work.

We did enquire of Mr Rennie as to where these “14,000 international treaties” could be found, but he was too busy helping poor people by fining them £80 a month to answer. Luckily, alert reader Angus McLellan was hot on the case, and swiftly directed us to a handy Foreign Office website featuring the magic number.

We’ve now had a brief skim through some of the UK’s historic agreements with other countries, and to save some time after 2014 we’ve knocked a few off the list.

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Unionists often like to talk about independence in terms of a “divorce” to try to tug at our heart strings and make us feel like we’d be leaving a much-loved partner. The implication, of course, is that divorces are always bad, with losers on both sides.

They get very huffy when independence supporters suggest that it’s more like an abusive marriage, despite our relationship with England being far more like Stockholm Syndrome than they would like to admit. (Something their own “it’s a big, bad world out there, you’ll never survive without us” rhetoric suggests is the case.)

But if we take the metaphor of the United Kingdom being a marriage at face value, then what kind of marriage is it? And more to the point, is it worth saving?

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Since we’re on the subject of Willie Rennie, we may as well have a look at the comments he’s made today in response to the Scottish Government’s publication of its “transition” plans in the event of a Yes vote. A clearer, more dispiriting example of the “We cannae dae it, Cap’n!” mentality would be hard to find.

“Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie insisted today that the SNP has “hopelessly underestimated the scale and complexity” of the task ahead.

“They would have to negotiate over 14,000 international treaties, a currency, the division of assets, membership of NATO and the host of international organisations,” he said.

“To say they will bang all this through in just 16 months is absurd. This will give most people in Scotland the shivers and fuel suspicion that the SNP are just making it up as they go along.”

Now, “making it up as they go along” is a pretty strange reaction in the first place to someone publishing a detailed planning document almost TWO YEARS ahead of the time it would be needed. But let’s humour the poor man and glance through his terrifying list of impossible tasks.

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