Wings Over Scotland

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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In the world of journalism, being second to a story carries certain advantages. The Sunday Herald scored a high-profile exclusive with its list of “Better Together” donators yesterday, but only told half the tale. Keen-eyed cyber-sleuths immediately started digging, and came up with some troubling information about by far the biggest contributor to the No camp’s fighting fund, excellently and concisely detailed here by Michael Gray of National Collective.

You’d imagine, then, that the likes of the Scotsman – with the advantage of an extra 24 hours to do some investigating and with all the leads already conveniently found and collected together for them – would have come up with some pretty interesting in-depth analysis on the subject, especially given how keen it usually is to look into anyone who financially backs the nationalist side.

(Not to mention the golden opportunity to get one over on its rival’s big exclusive by pointing out what they missed in their haste to be first.)

Oh well.

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And we’ll give you a clue – the thing we’re in, we’re in it without a paddle.

The above is a graph released by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, invariably described as a “respected” economic research organisation of no particular political leaning. It’s an analysis of the likely impact of the coalition’s tax and welfare “reforms” on various demographic groups over the period of the current government.

It takes a moment’s study to make sense of (and it’s by far the most accessible thing they publish, though if you’re an economics whiz you can find all sorts of detailed cleverclogs stuff on their website), so we’ll quickly take you through a few bullet points.

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This site often reflects on the absence of real political choice available to the UK electorate, but it has rarely been more clearly illustrated than it was on this morning’s BBC breakfast news in an interview with Labour’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

Interviewed by presenter Charlie Stayt, Balls first clarified Labour’s position on the top-rate tax cut taking effect this week. Refusing to commit Labour to restoring the 50p rate if elected in 2015, Balls nevertheless made the meaningless pledge that if an election were to be held tomorrow it would be in Labour’s manifesto.

(An interesting distinction from “We would actually do it”, of course.)

We’re a bit puzzled by this. Either a 50p tax rate brings in more money or it doesn’t (and it does – even George Osborne’s own budget statement noted that it raised an extra £1bn for the Treasury compared to the 40p rate that preceded it), so what does it matter what the country’s general economic condition is? Shouldn’t Labour be committed as a matter of principle to wealth redistribution by taxing the rich?

Instead, Balls said that reducing the rate to 45p was “not my priority” (rather than, say, “I think it’s wrong”), suggesting that it was nevertheless something he’d want to do. But it was on welfare reform that he was most revealing.

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When we’ve reached the point where even the Daily Telegraph is calling the British Prime Minister a liar, it’s probably about time someone laid out the facts about the UK’s nuclear weapons, and in particular how they relate to Scotland.

Let’s see if we can keep it brief.

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Much has been and will be written about David Cameron’s visit to Scotland today, during which he’s expected to vigorously advocate the continuation and renewal of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent”. Which didn’t deter Iraq from invading Kuwait, or Argentina from invading UK territory in the Falklands, but never mind.

(We’re also not clear on why North Korea or Iran would have any sort of beef with an independent Scotland anyway, as opposed to the UK. It seems to this website that the surest way for Scotland to avoid even the microscopically minuscule future prospect of an attack from either nation is to disentangle ourselves from Westminster’s much-hated foreign policy with all possible haste.)

But none of it will be as telling as a single line in the Telegraph today:

“Mr Cameron insists the Trident programme offers good value – at an annual cost of 1.5 per cent of Britain’s benefits bill.”

Could he have made it any clearer? The savage, failing austerity and welfare “reform” programme designed to annihilate the last remnants of civilised British society is explicitly contrasted with the “bargain” we’re getting by spending our money on a useless weapon system designed solely to murder millions in vengeance after we’re already dead. That’s what the United Kingdom stands for, Labour and Tory together.

The argument that Cameron is stealthily trying to sabotage the No campaign in order to shore up the Conservatives’ powerbase in England gets more convincing daily.

As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

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After six years in kneejerk opposition, extending even so far as to abstain on or vote against budgets with their own amendments in them, Scottish Labour have apparently suddenly discovered the merits of mature, constructive consensus politics. This week has seen the party calling for unity in opposing the bedroom tax, and demanding that the Scottish Government should mitigate the effect on social-housing tenants by providing tens of millions of pounds from its own budget to bridge the gap.

There are numerous reasons why this isn’t a practical long-term solution, some of which we explore in the comments on this Labour activist’s blog post. But if anyone should be wondering why it might also seem politically unattractive to the SNP, perhaps it might be instructive to note what Labour’s reaction was when the Nats did that very thing a year ago, when finance secretary John Swinney found £40m to lessen the effects of UK government cuts forcing the poorest to contribute more Council Tax.

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