Wings Over Scotland

There’s a rather interesting story buried deep down in the dusty undergrowth of the Scotsman’s politics section today, featuring Jeremy Purvis of the cross-party “Devo Plus” (remember THEM?) group, which apparently marks its anniversary this month.

Purvis’s campaign (also featuring former Tory Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson and, um, we’re sure we’ll recall the others shortly) pretty much died at birth – its Twitter account last saw action on November 30 last year and we can’t even tell when the website was last updated because it has no timestamps, but it was a LONG time ago. He seems to have sensed an opportunity today, though, and has called on what the Scotsman rather startlingly refers to as “the anti-independence parties” to support Devo +’s proposals to devolve full tax powers to Holyrood in the event of a No vote.

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There’s a faintly astonishing story in today’s Scotsman. As if belatedly realising the damage that they’d done to the No campaign by detailing Labour’s toys-out-of-pram tantrum in the House Of Commons this week, the paper runs a firefighting exercise of a follow-up piece which reveals no new information, but gives the party a helpful platform from which to try to winch itself out of the hole.

(A “senior party source” duly obliged with the comically-absurd assertion that “the party’s main concern was that without a reference to independence, an MP could be stopped from speaking for going off the subject.”)

That’s not the astonishing part, of course – giving Unionist parties a platform is what the Scotsman exists for. The amazing thing is the size of the gulf between what the story reports as the reason for the debate’s cancellation and what the person whose debate it was had already said in public a full day earlier.

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Fans of TV panel shows will probably be aware of a regular strand on the BBC’s Mock The Week called “Between The Lines”, in which one comedian delivers lines from a speech in the persona of a public figure, while the other translates what they really mean. There’s a chucklesome example here.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to have our own attempt, with a letter sent out this week to the No campaign’s mailing list by the independence debate’s own Hugh Dennis: “Better Together” campaign director and creative truth interpreter Blair McDougall.

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In coverage of the latest Ipsos-MORI Scottish Public Opinion Monitor poll, the media will likely focus as usual on the not-particularly-dramatic headline figures, showing a welcome but not enormously relevant (so far away from the vote) swing of 3.5% to Yes. What we find much more interesting is the data a couple of pages down.

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It defies belief, in a way. It’s now been a full week since we mocked Willie Rennie’s embarrassingly clueless claim that an independent Scotland would need to negotiate “14,000 international treaties”, in a feature which was widely circulated and quoted.

So ridiculed was Rennie’s claim that even the Scotsman couldn’t make it stick, acknowledging on Monday that it had been exaggerated by at least 70%, with a maximum of 8500 actually still being in effect, let alone relevant to Scotland. An entertaining introductory package on last night’s Newsnight Scotland even highlighted our particular favourite of the UK’s treaties.

At which point the programme brought on the rare protected species that is Scotland’s only Tory MP, the Scotland Office minister David Mundell.

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In an intervention that could in time-worn political terms be described as “brave”, the Secretary of State for Scotland insisted yesterday that recent legal advice to the UK government means an independent Scotland would not inherit the UK’s existing international treaties but would still nonetheless inherit a share of the UK national debt.

The UK Government’s understanding of new legal analysis on the implications of Scottish independence is in their view proof that the most likely outcome of Scottish independence would be the continuation of the UK as the existing state under international law and the creation of a new state of Scotland.

However, the report’s authors declined to rule out the creation of two completely new states or the resurrection of the Scottish state that existed prior to 1707 – although both outcomes were deemed unlikely by Westminster. But just in case anyone wasn’t yet adequately confused, the report’s authors went on to say this (our emphasis):

“Assuming that Scotland would be recognised as a new state, albeit a successor state to the UK, it is difficult to see how Scotland could evade the accession process for new states in the EU treaties.”

So this new “definitive” legal advice doesn’t in fact rule out any of the only three options available, and in fact defines Scotland as both a “new” and a “successor” state, seemingly contradictorily. But what does all this mean? To try to shed some light, let’s look at what international law says on the subject of borders, treaties and debts.

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Observed – so far as we’re aware – by nobody, today’s UK government paper also torpedoes another core argument hitherto beloved of Unionists in the independence debate. That argument runs “Scotland and England would not be entitled to equal successor-state status, because Scottish independence would NOT in fact be a dissolution of the Union, because the current UK was formed not by the 1707 Acts of Union but by the 1800 treaty incorporating Ireland.”

The document, however, expressly blows that contention out of the water:

“36.      We note that the incorporation of Wales under laws culminating in the Laws in Wales Act 1536 (England) and of Ireland, previously a colony, under the Union with Ireland Act 1801 (GB) and the Act of Union 1800 (Ireland) did not affect state continuity. Despite its similarity to the union of 1707, Scottish and English writers unite in seeing the incorporation of Ireland not as the creation of a new state but as an accretion without any consequences in international law.“

File this one for future reference, readers.

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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