Wings Over Scotland

The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.

First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:

This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.

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This month we’ve been noting a sudden avalanche of factually-questionable articles in the media attacking the SNP’s record in government. At the weekend and yesterday we also picked apart a highly misleading and disingenuous claim by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics that there had been no cuts to the Scottish Government budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

And today we can see why.

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We weren’t going to take Professor Adam Tomkins’ hysterical “NATMAGEDDON!” article for this week’s Spectator seriously enough to pull it apart line by line.

But once we’d wiped the tears from our eyes we thought we’d better do our job.

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As readers may have noticed, it’s been an extremely slow news week this week. The papers, having strung out the Michelle Thomson “crisis” beyond all endurance, have been reduced (in the case of today’s Daily Mail) to printing shock-horror pictures of her still sitting beside SNP MPs in the Commons, so little else is there to report.

(As far as we’re aware the Commons doesn’t have an official naughty step, so even if Thomson HAD been found guilty of doing anything wrong she’d have had to sit on the opposition benches just the same.)

But it seems the dastardly Nats have been getting up to something even worse than associating with a (currently) former colleague.

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After this, this and this we were really hoping we’d never have to revisit the subject of the D’Hondt Method and get our calculator out again.

But OH NO!

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Much has been made this week of the Scottish Government’s decision to award a water services contract for council buildings, schools, prisons and some other public facilities to an English company (Anglian Water) over the bid by Business Stream, a wholly-owned subsidiary of publicly-owned Scottish Water.

Opponents of the SNP have claimed that the awarding of this contract means that the Scottish Government has somehow privatised the provision of water in Scotland.

Readers may not be completely astonished to learn it’s not true.

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Most of Scotland’s news outlets, including the Times, Herald, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Express and the BBC, run today with the story that one in three Police Scotland officers intend to leave the force in the next three years, according to a recent survey for the Scottish Police Authority.

(The print edition of the Scotsman makes it the front-page splash, although the article has mysteriously vanished from its website.)

But a couple of pieces of important information are inexplicably missing.

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Nobody else is going to do this, so we’ll do it ourselves.

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All five of the opinion pollsters who regularly poll on Scottish politics (Panelbase, YouGov, TNS, Ipsos Mori and Survation) have now published surveys in the past two weeks asking the independence question. So it seems reasonable to expect there’ll be no more polls before the anniversary of the referendum on Friday.

Given the conventional wisdom that the economy, underpinned by that pesky volatile oil, was the main reason not enough Scots could be persuaded to take the leap into self-government, readers might expect that the dramatic collapse in the oil price since last year (when we checked today it was trading at just over $47 a barrel, less than half the $97 it was at the start of September 2014) would only have cemented voters’ feeling that they made the right decision.

So why is the opposite true?

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A very brief post about football, because it was irritating to listen to the avalanche of gloom on social media on Friday night as Scotland lost to Georgia (again), and then have to watch this honking oaf go trolling.

Shut your faces, all of you.

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Yesterday we noted an interesting apparent shift in the BBC’s political stance with regard to Scotland. Two serving senior political reporters have made open attacks on the SNP, backed up by other media and politicians, seemingly abandoning all notions of the impartiality to which the BBC is bound by charter.

(The Guardian’s hostile editorial was particularly bizarre, suggesting that devolving control of broadcasting in Scotland to Holyrood would turn the BBC into a mouthpiece of government, which inescapably suggests that the current Westminster-controlled BBC is a tool of either Labour or the Tories, depending which one is in power.)

This morning’s edition of The Times is the latest to join the offensive.

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Stat-pummelled readers will be glad to know that this is the last article we plan to write about the vagaries of the AMS electoral system, and how it might apply to next year’s Scottish Parliament election, for some time. This one also shouldn’t be full of tables and figures, so strap yourself in and let’s get this job finished.

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