Wings Over Scotland

Tory commentator* David Torrance was a little mean about us on Twitter last night, but we won’t hold it against him. As a ubiquitous cross-media Scottish pundit, though, we’re a bit more concerned about his journalistic diligence and grasp of arithmetic.

The bespectacled biographer appeared on the evening’s edition of Scotland Tonight, and tweeted a question about the preceding interview with Blair Jenkins, in which the Yes campaign chief had claimed to recall opinion polls in recent years showing a majority for independence. Helpfully, we sent over a link, annotated with details of several that fitted the criterion of a higher Yes vote than No vote.

But it turns out that according to Mr Torrance, getting more votes than the only other option in a two-choice referendum doesn’t count as a win.

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Sorry, readers. It’s our fault. Around teatime on Sunday we rather recklessly tweeted “Is Magnus Gardham on holiday? The Herald’s been a much more balanced paper this last week or two”, and in doing so appear to have summoned him back, Candyman-style, despite only saying his name once. It must have been retweets or something.

Gardham’s sticky fingerprints are all over the Herald’s front-page splash this morning, even though he shares the byline with the now-rarely-seen Robbie Dinwoodie. The piece reports a TNS-BMRB poll showing a rather remarkable 2.5% swing towards independence since October – despite that period being depicted uniformly across the Scottish and UK political media as a quarterium-annus horribilis for the Yes campaign, and for the SNP and Alex Salmond in particular – under the extraordinarily contrived headline “Blow to SNP as support for independence stalls”.

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The final aspect of the independence debate touched on by Alistair Darling’s interview on Newsnight Scotland last night brought some more much-needed clarity to the situation. In this segment of the programme the issue being pursued by Gordon Brewer was what the Unionist parties were going to offer the Scottish electorate in the way of greater devolution in the event of a No vote.

Uncharacteristically, Darling was a little evasive when Brewer first raised the issue, but thankfully some hard facts were soon forthcoming.

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While we welcomed the definitive answer on the question of an independent Scotland’s relationship to the United Kingdom, we were a little disturbed by something Alistair Darling said about Europe in his Newsnight Scotland interview last night.

It happened at 13m 42s. See what you think. (Emphasis Darling’s own this time.)

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For goodness’ sake. Despite believing we’d laid the issue to rest once and for all, we’re STILL getting comments and tweets from readers who haven’t grasped Alistair Darling’s simple, straightforward explanation of whether Scotland’s decision in the independence referendum would be irreversible and forever, or whether we would instead quickly and inevitably find ourselves back in the Union.

Since you clearly found our previous quotes from the “Better Together” chairman inexplicably ambiguous, we’ve gone back and found a couple more from the same interview that should DEFINITELY clear things up.

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Readers might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu on watching last night's Newsnight Scotland, which featured a rather animated interview with Alistair Darling. Because not for the first time, the No campaign chief seemed to be experiencing a considerable amount of difficulty in getting his story straight.

Let's examine a couple of intriguing snippets.

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February 2012: “Don’t worry, Scotland – the Olympics might be costing you millions of pounds, but look at all the extra tourism you’ll be getting from it to compensate!”

What could possibly go wrong? Bring on the bonanza!

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We had a conversation on Twitter with a fan of The Rangers this evening (though he was terribly upset at the use of the term for some reason). It was sparked by Charles Green’s latest piece of box-office wizardry, in which he gave an interview – watchable for just 99p on the club’s website – professing his fury at the Ibrox side’s apparent exclusion from league reconstruction talks and vowing to remove Rangers International Football Club PLC from Scottish football at the first available opportunity.

And on the face of it, Green has a legitimate complaint. Rule 19 (above) of the SFL Constitution expressly notes that Associate Members such as TRFC are entitled to “attend and speak at” any meeting of the League, though not to vote, and according to Green his club have in fact been completely ignored in the discussions. But beyond that, it’s extremely hard to actually work out what his beef is.

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Wait, sorry. We got confused. As far as we can establish from some recent official statements by the UK Government, the No campaign and the media, Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going if Scotland votes for independence. Let’s have a quick recap on where we’re up to.

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This site’s primary purpose is the provision of facts. We want to persuade people of the merits of independence, but we want to do it with the truth, which is why we have a conspicuous policy of providing links whenever we make factual assertions. That often means criticising other media when it adopts a more lax approach to upholding proper journalistic standards, whether we like that media or not.

Last night’s Scotland Tonight repeatedly made a casual assertion about opinion polls on independence which, as we’ll see in a moment, was simply untrue. We make, and intend, no suggestion that they did so from malice or bias. We’re just pointing out that they got it wrong, so that people will be armed with the correct facts.

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The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

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The Scottish football media has apparently become suddenly convinced that the SPL’s proposed 12-12-18 league reconstruction plan is going to happen, and very possibly as soon as next year. Today’s papers are full of analysis of the story, but as usual it’s pretty shallow stuff which appears to miss all the main implications in favour of a simplistic “is it confusing for the fans and where would it leave Rangers?” dual angle.

So with the usual apologies to the football-hating politics fans, let’s have a wee delve.

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