Wings Over Scotland

So this one was interesting.

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On a number of previous occasions we’ve highlighted the weird discrepancy between the undivided loathing of the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act in the Scottish media and the Act’s overwhelming popularity with the Scottish public.

You will struggle to ever hear a voice anywhere in the media in favour of it, yet there has never been a law in the history of the Holyrood parliament that is as universally backed by the electorate as the OBFA. Support for it crosses party lines, unites men and women, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, Yes voters and No voters, Celtic fans and “Rangers” fans, football lovers and football haters, and pretty much any other groups you can think of.

Despite their own voters wanting to retain it, however, the combined opposition parties may well succeed in having the Act repealed this year, for reasons of their own that we can’t begin to rationally explain.

Meanwhile, every party at Holyrood – this time including the SNP – looks as though they may be preparing to come together and implement the LEAST-wanted legislation (in terms of public opinion) that the Parliament will have ever seen.

But which legislation are we talking about?

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In the Guardian today:

If only we had some data on that oh wait of course we do.

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So this isn’t true, any more than it was when Labour first promised it 22 years ago.

But the sheer number of ways in which it’s a lie is quite the thing.

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This week’s Scottish budget threw the opposition parties and the media into panic and disarray. Evidently having expected considerably more swingeing tax hikes than the extremely modest increases that were imposed on higher earners, they’d built up a head of steaming fury that had nowhere to go, and have been reduced to frantically scrabbling around for extreme (or flat-out wrong) examples to try to generate outrage.

Today’s politics lead in the Scottish Mail On Sunday is a case in point.

By going through all the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, the SMoS has managed to pick out a tiny anomaly around National Insurance thresholds, and portrayed it as hitting people on a very healthy but not exactly super-rich salary of £45,000 with a total tax-and-NI rate of 53%.

The small print, as ever, is rather less dramatic.

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Because to tell you the truth, readers, we’re not sure the word “idiot” is accurate any more. The tweets you’re about to read are far beyond simple stupidity and well into the shadowy realms of deliberate falsehood. (Delivered in the secure knowledge that the media won’t challenge it, and in fact will probably exaggerate and amplify it further.)

So let’s start with one of the better-known dum-dums.

That’s serial bonehead Jamie Greene there, demonstrating that he can’t count up to two, because what he evidently meant to write was “two pictures say eleven words”.

This should be good.

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The Tories kicked off yesterday’s reaction to the budget with a straight-up lie.

No promise has been broken. The basic rate HAS been frozen, at 20p, and low and middle earners HAVE been protected. Nobody who’s on less than £33,000 – which is considerably higher than the average (£23K) or full-time median (£28K) wages – will pay a penny more tax, and the large majority of Scots will in fact see a small tax cut.

(The weasel-wording justification is of course that pretty much everyone who pays tax pays some of it at the basic rate, and are therefore in a sense “basic-rate taxpayers”. But “nobody will pay any more tax” wasn’t the promise. Indeed, the manifesto pledge is a pretty clear implication that better-off people WOULD be taxed a little more.)

But the numbering was interesting. In order to try to obscure that fact that most Scots would be paying LESS tax as a result of the budget, the Tories went with a nicely vague but high-sounding “hundreds of thousands” for the number of people who’d lose out a little. And then the Scottish media went to work.

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Alert readers of the Scottish Mail On Sunday – if any such people exist, that is – will have noticed that the paper has of late been cutting both costs and the middleman by giving Tory MSPs entire pages to spout party propaganda for free rather than paying a journalist to slightly rewrite it.

First Ruth Davidson, and now the party’s finance spokesloyalist Murdo Fraser, have recently had free rein to say whatever they liked to the paper’s readership, and today Fraser chose to go with the topic of “waste”.

(Following on from a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail piece last month about which we’ll have some startling new information for you very soon.)

It seemed oddly familiar, with one rather significant alteration.

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The media is aflame this morning with discussion of the agreement between the UK and EU with particular regard to Ireland, in which the UK essentially concedes just about everything including free movement, the thing most Brexiters voted Leave for.

We’ve largely avoided analysis of the Brexit negotiations here on Wings up until now, because there’s been a raft of people who are far more expert on the subject than us doing it at enormous length, very little of it directly concerned Scotland, and so nobody really needed our tuppence-worth. But this one’s big.

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The Scottish Daily Mail runs this shock-horror outrage piece today:

Let’s zoom in a little closer on that, shall we?

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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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