Wings Over Scotland

There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.

It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.

Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.

And it’s not hard to see why.

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Sky News earlier this morning:

Our ears always prick up when Kezia says she’s counted something herself.

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It seems counter-intuitive – given Rupert Murdoch’s often-overstated (despite endless and fevered speculation, the Scottish Sun didn’t back a Yes vote) but still seemingly real support for Scottish independence – that Sky News should be seen as the most hostile of the nation’s broadcasters to the Yes movement.

Yet such it is.

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Here’s the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, speaking to BBC News this morning and giving a striking illustration of the term “dancing on the head of a pin”.

Comically, his excuse for demanding another referendum on leaving the EU while opposing a second Scottish independence referendum is that his new EU vote would be a completely different question – he’d be asking voters if they wanted to accept the Brexit deal and exit from the EU (which one might reasonably summarise on the ballot paper as “Leave”), or to refuse to approve the deal and stay in the EU (or put another way, “Remain”).

Glad we cleared that up, then. But then it got weirder.

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Scottish Labour’s regional branch manager (North Britain) clearly thought this was so important she needed to say it twice:

But that’s not helping us make any sense of it. All sarcasm and snark aside, we can’t figure out what on Earth it’s supposed to mean.

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The announcement that the Scottish Government would seek the uncontested legal right to hold a second independence referendum met with an outpouring of rage and ignorance from the massed ranks of the UK media that was in one sense entirely predictable yet still startling in its fury and ferocity.

Most prominent was the assertion, stated as fact by every pundit and broadcaster – including those required by law to be fair and impartial – that a second referendum would be conducted in the environment of a significantly worse economic case.

And that’s a remarkable claim, because the indisputable fact is that nobody has the slightest clue what the economic case for No will be.

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Alert readers will of course be aware that one of this site’s most frequently-recurring themes is “phantom news”, whereby events or unpleasant opinions that newspapers or broadcasters really want to have happened are conveniently brought to life, either by some random nobody on the internet, or an unnamed “source” or “insider”.

(Or in a real emergency, simply asserted with no evidence at all.)

So when Nicola Sturgeon did something today that nearly everyone in the Northern Hemisphere knew she was going to do sometime soon, but wasn’t expecting just yet, there wasn’t time to prepare actual real people with the required quotes.

In the modern media world, though, that isn’t a problem.

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Scottish leader Willie Rennie on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland:

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We saw this exchange on Twitter this morning, involving left-wing Labour activist Eoin Clarke, a reader, and Scottish Labour list MSP Elaine Smith.

Smith professed to find it “unbelievable” and “scary” that the reader thought he’d had Tory governments for most of his lifetime. (We asked him how old he was and he said 34, which means he’s had Tory governments for 62% of his life, so that checks out.)

But it’s a standard Scottish Labour line that there’s no real difference between Scottish and English voters in terms of favouring left-wing politics, so we thought we’d just quickly check the arithmetic on that. The results are unlikely to shock you.

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We don’t want to fall into the trap of portraying the Liberal Democrats as a party of any political relevance or consequence in Scotland, but for the sheer comedy value alone Willie Rennie’s interview with Gary Robertson on today’s Good Morning Scotland is worth a couple of minutes of your time.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 10 March 2017)
.

So, are we all clear?

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We haven’t said much about the huge furore whipped up by the Guardian in recent days around spurious allegations of racism/online abuse by supporters of Scottish independence, made first by Sadiq Khan and then by a deranged “Better Together” activist who also thinks all vegans are racist (or something).

Partly that’s because we covered the initial speech by Khan and the fallout from it pretty extensively, and partly because we didn’t want to feed the Guardian’s clickbait.

However, when the activist who was allegedly “hounded off Twitter” in fear for her life – fear caused by supposed comments that nobody has actually seen – miraculously recovered her bravery less than a week later (coincidentally just in time for the launch of her book), we thought it was probably time someone started keeping some records.

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Last year, as we’ve done a number of times in the past, we wrote about the dangers of handcuffing the independence movement to a particular narrow political agenda. Conflating a Yes vote with a number of hardline ideological positions which are more or less unquestioned within the liberal commentariat and the radical left, but actually highly unpopular with the general public, is self-evidently a huge strategic mistake.

Many of those positions are ones which this site supports in their own right, such as abolition of the monarchy and the abandonment of nuclear weapons, but our stance has always been that those arguments – like membership of the EU and NATO – are ones which ought properly to be conducted among the people and elected politicians of an independent Scotland in their own good time, not imposed without debate as part of the package of independence.

This weekend the notionally pro-independence Sunday Herald newspaper – as well as taking part in a media-wide Unionist smear campaign against this site and defending a “Better Together” activist who’d written a deeply offensive clickbait Guardian article claiming that Scottish nationalism was racist – carried a front cover and inside spread on the heated topic of mandatory gender quotas, which the paper supports.

As it happened we’d asked about the subject in our Panelbase poll last month.

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