Something kept nagging at the back of our minds as we read today’s front-page lead story in Scotland On Sunday about a battle between finance secretary John Swinney and a number of Scottish councils.
And then we remembered what it was.
Here’s Kezia in the Independent yesterday:
The most powerful? Did it just get promoted?
In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.
It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.
The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.
But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.
With little in the way of news to chew on, the Scottish political blogosphere has begun to eat itself of late, with an exhausting number of articles on popular sites about how an SNP list vote is a wasted vote and anyone thinking of voting for the Nats in both constituency and region is a deluded cultist/simple-witted idiot (mostly written by candidates/supporters of other parties who are often not identified as such), and now some angry pieces from disgruntled SNP supporters making the opposite point.
All are based, from one perspective or another, on opinion polls and seat predictions based on those polls, some of which appear to be based on very shaky premises.
We’ve already broken down the mechanics of the Scottish electoral system at very considerable length, so readers will be relieved that we’re not going to get into that again. Instead, we thought we’d take a very specific region-by-region look at the scale of the task facing the fringe parties.
We suppose we shouldn’t technically be surprised that today’s newspapers carry no analysis whatsoever of Kezia Dugdale’s big speech yesterday detailing Scottish Labour’s first big election pledge – a £6000 handout to first-time home buyers.
After all, current polling suggests Scottish Labour have about as much chance of exerting any influence in the next Scottish Parliament as Lemmy has of posthumously winning the Eurovision Song Contest, so it doesn’t really matter if Kezia Dugdale promises every voter a free unicorn made of diamonds and glitter.
Still, if only for the mental exercise, it’s worth taking a look in detail.
As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.
In more senses than one.
The Scottish Daily Mail, which alongside its Sunday sister paper is spending the festive period engaged in an “SNP BAD!” frenzy – attacking the party over everything from foxhunting to the brutal Stalinist suppression of free speech to using taxpayers’ money to send people Christmas cards – today runs the same story across a news page, a comment column and an editorial leader:
Let’s take a closer look.
We’ve spoken a number of times before on this site about the “gish gallop” or “swarm of wasps” debating technique, in which a person attempts to bury their opponent under such an overwhelming tsunami of false, misleading or nonsensical claims in a short space of time that they can’t possibly debunk it all.
The Urban Dictionary gives an example of the form:
Faced with such a rushing torrent of drivel, it’s almost impossible for an opponent to know where to start in order to begin to even scratch the surface (if you can scratch a torrent). And that brings us directly to Severin Carrell’s article in today’s Guardian.
Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.
Here’s what we’ve got so far.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday’s shock-horror Forth Road Bridge story today is also accompanied by an editorial leader. And if the main article was a piece of bare-faced deception, it’s got nothing on the opinion piece.
We’ve been struggling to get a good grip on what’s happening with the Forth Road Bridge this week. It’s a confusing tale full of contradictory financial and engineering detail, being flayed for all it’s worth by the Unionist media and opposition.
As usual, we’ll make this as simple as possible.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
