Wings Over Scotland

Readers will doubtless be startled to hear that today’s Scottish newspapers have taken a somewhat misleading approach to the facts on one of the day’s big stories.

Several of them report the findings of a commission looking into the idea of a Citizen’s (or Universal) Basic Income, a scheme which pays every adult in the country a fixed sum every year regardless of their own income, almost completely replacing the current benefits system.

(We’ll use Universal/UBI, to avoid confusion with the greedy-businessman trade body.)

The idea is that as well as reducing poverty, the administrative costs of social security are massively reduced, as is the problem of vulnerable people not taking up benefits because of the stigma often attached to them by the press.

The downside is that it’s generally more expensive. But have the Scottish press accurately reported the scale of that cost, or have they massively exaggerated it for shock value and to serve a right-wing agenda? Read on for a surprise!

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As readers who were once children will probably recall, papier-mache is a substance in which incredibly flimsy material – such as tissue paper or newspaper – is turned into something rather more hard and durable by dint of combining multiple layers of it with a simple flour-and-water solution.

What’s less well-known is that the process also happens IN newspapers.

For a case study, let’s look at this article in today’s Times.

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The Scottish Daily Mail almost explodes with fury over new crime statistics today:

Which is weird. Because there’s less crime in Scotland than there’s ever been at any time in modern history. How do we know that? Because the Mail tells us so.

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We stuck this short clip up on YouTube yesterday as a throwaway while watching the Labour conference in slack-jawed astonishment (a visitor from an alien planet would have concluded it was the gathering of a party that had just won a landslide victory, not lost its third general election in a row), but on reflection it deserves a proper post.

If you know anything at all about the story of how female Glasgow City Council employees have fought for equal pay, you’ll probably be as outraged as we are at Baxter’s bulletproof brass neck. But the video actually demonstrates what appears to be Scottish Labour’s master strategy for winning back Scotland.

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This weekend’s Scottish Mail On Sunday carries a column from UK Cabinet Office minister Damian Green which, if anyone was still in any doubt, rings just about every warning bell imaginable in terms of the Tories’ plan to use Brexit to cripple devolution both in principle and in practice.

It’s tucked away on page 27 and doesn’t appear on the Mail’s website, but you can read the whole thing by clicking the pic above. And below, we’ve pulled out the key sentences that should have the blood of devolution-loving No voters running cold.

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The Daily Record have continued to run Kezia Dugdale’s weekly column despite her resignation as Scottish Labour branch office manager (North British division), and this week we were interested to note her assessment of the devolution years, which could be summarised neatly as “Labour devolution good, SNP devolution bad”.

We raised an especially quizzical eyebrow at the claim that the 1999-2007 Labour/Lib Dem administrations had apparently ended homelessness. So we thought we’d do that thing we do when Kezia Dugdale claims something.

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A story from the Financial Times this week revealed the UK government’s latest act of sabotage against the Scottish renewable energy industry. It’s just one more in a long line stretching back to just after the independence referendum, when a string of “Better Together” promises were broken almost the minute the No vote was secured.

It was a particularly weak argument in the first place – if there’s a market in the rUK for Scottish energy, it’ll be there whether Scotland is independent or not. But it unravelled faster than most as soon as it had done its job.

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The Scottish Tories came under fire yesterday for a crass attempt by Scotland’s least-elected MSP (2,062-vote Annie Wells) to hijack World Suicide Prevention Day with a blog complaining that more people were being prescribed anti-depressants, which for many are an effective and life-saving solution.

Scottish Labour duly joined in by attacking mental health provision in Scotland despite it having significantly more NHS consultant psychiatrists per head than anywhere else in the UK. (One for every 10,000 people in Scotland, compared to 1 for every 12,500 in England and one for every 17,000 in Wales and Northern Ireland.)

But is there any explanation for why more people are suffering mental health issues?

So once again, Unionist politicians are bitterly castigating the Scottish Government for problems caused by UK government policy. It’s enough to drive you mad.

After a few months with no Scottish polling, today’s Sunday Times carries the results of a Panelbase one which, among other things, reinforces our oft-stated view that Scottish subsamples of UK-wide polls are completely meaningless.

While several of those have shown Labour or even the Tories in the lead, the full-size, properly-weighted poll still has the SNP a massive 14 points in front on 42%, with the Tories trailing behind on 28% and Labour in their now-customary third place at 22%.

Support for independence is also slightly down, with the numbers at 43-57, but it’s some other findings that are the eye-openers.

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One of the handiest things for truth-seeking political commentators (admittedly a rare breed) is that the three component nations that make up Great Britain currently all have different parties in government, so it’s always possible to measure the rhetoric of the main parties against their actions in the bit they’re actually in charge of.

So when Scottish Labour, for example, try to grab the credit for the SNP ending the public sector pay freeze by claiming that they’re “following Labour’s lead”, it’s a simple matter to look to Wales – where Labour run the Assembly – and note that the pay freeze there is very much still in place, with the Labour executive, unlike the Scottish Government, refusing to find the money to end it from its own budget.

(The same is true for many other policies the Scottish Government has implemented to fight Tory austerity, like free university tuition and mitigating the bedroom tax.)

And the Tories are no less hypocritical.

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The Times today carries an article sparking the annual revival of one of the evergreen mysteries of Scottish politics: just how many (or more accurately, how few) people are in the Scottish Labour Party?

The piece sees leadership contest avoider Alex Rowley crowing about a fall in the SNP’s membership income, based on this year’s party accounts as just released by the Electoral Commission.

So we thought we’d take a look at some numbers.

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When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.

Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.

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