Wings Over Scotland

All this year we’ve been noticing a curious re-writing of history in the Scottish and UK media. It’s spanned left-wing and right-wing press, and even Yes-friendly voices like Iain Macwhirter and the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier have been sucked in.

Yet it’s such a fundamentally bizarre misunderstanding of a political system that’s now been running in Scotland for 16 years that we’re bewildered at the way everyone’s suddenly decided that it happened.

The latest occurrence of this odd phenomenon was in yesterday’s Daily Record, and the subject is the newly-alleged “informal deal” between the minority SNP government of 2007-11 and the Scottish Conservatives.

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Well, at least now we know why Labour are so wedded to this shameful lie.

It’s because they’ve already given up on winning the rest of the UK.

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One of the main strengths of the No campaign in the independence referendum was that it had an efficient production line for “truthiness”. Best known as a concept from the US satirical TV show The Colbert Report, the term means things that SOUND as if they’re true, and which people will therefore be inclined to believe, even though they fall apart under any factual scrutiny.

One good example is shown above. The facts on the graphic are individually true, and convey – without ever actually saying so explicitly – the message that Scotland is subsidised by the UK to the tune of £7.6bn a year.

But that message, despite being implied through exclusively true facts, ISN’T true, because the extra “spending” on Scotland is actually borrowing, which Scotland has to pay back. The real truth is that the figures on the left are accurate, and that Scotland heavily subsidises the rest of the UK.

But to walk someone through even the basic explanation of that is quite complicated and involved, whereas the original message is punchy and SOUNDS true. The simpler something is the more people want to believe it, so the implicit lie on the graphic is difficult to dislodge from their minds once it’s in there.

(It works especially well if the media is overwhelmingly on the side of those creating the misleading impression, because they can count on the fact that the mainstream press won’t run any analysis pointing out the flaws in the argument, and the only people who’ll ever encounter the explanation are those who actively seek it out.)

Truthiness, then, is a very powerful tool.

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There’s a very strange article on the front page of the Herald website this morning. It’s an interview with Nigel Farage in which the UKIP leader insists that his party, not the SNP, will hold the balance of power in the UK parliament after May’s election.

It’s a bold assertion given that current projections put the SNP on anywhere from 30 to 56 seats with UKIP expected to struggle to get 5 to 10. But Farage’s rationale for the statement is an interesting one.

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The very few readers who don’t immediately just snort and turn the page when they see the words “George Foulkes” may have noticed in yesterday’s Herald that the thirsty peer could be found gloating gleefully that had Scotland voted for independence last September it would now be “bankrupt” due to the decline in oil prices.

We can’t be bothered pointing out for the 500th time that a Yes vote wouldn’t have seen Scotland actually independent until March 2016, and that the oil price NOW is therefore about as relevant to anything as, well, Baron Foulkes himself.

But we couldn’t help noticing a couple of small arithmetical details.

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There really isn’t very much of a news story in this morning’s Sun “exclusive” that some Labour MPs say they’d quit the party rather than work with the SNP should the electorate deliver such a result in May. One told the paper:

“I would quit the party — there’s no way I would sit alongside them.

We’ve just spent three years knocking lumps out of each other in the independence referendum, how could we then share power?”

Those of us who remember the parade of furious Scottish Labour figures going on TV and openly threatening to scupper any “rainbow coalition” involving the Nats in 2010, thereby ensuring that David Cameron and George Osborne came to power, won’t be the least bit surprised at the sheer depth of hatred and jealous rage that consumes Labour’s branch office in North Britain when the SNP are mentioned.

And there’s nothing eyebrow-raisingly new in Scottish Labour’s spiteful determination that if Scots vote against the Conservatives – but not for Labour – they should be punished with Tory governments. It’s the standard policy of electoral blackmail that the party has deployed against the rise of rivals from the left for years, and which it’s now also turning against the Greens south of the border.

But there is a telling phrase in that short quote.

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Independent website Political Compass has just released its 2015 graph charting the ideological positions of all the political parties of the UK. It’s a fairly predictable one.

On the image above, we’ve added, for parties active in Scotland only, striped circles indicating each party’s 2010 position. But what does it tell us about 2015?

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It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

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A quick rhetorical question, readers: if, as Labour endlessly claim, the Tories want the SNP to win seats in Scotland in order to stop Ed Miliband being PM, why are most of the Scottish columnists in the right-wing press calling on Scots to vote Labour?

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Even we can’t quite believe this one, readers.

Good grief, where do we even start?

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From the latest YouGov polling. Ooft.

Remarkably, 26% of people planning to vote Labour in May, and an astounding 54% of likely Tory voters, say the SNP are the best guarantors of more powers, while 21% of Labour voters and 37% of Tories also answer “SNP” to the second question.

We wouldn’t want to be in Scottish Labour’s shoes if they were made of diamonds.

We pondered long and hard over how best to analyse Scottish Labour’s bewildering, oh-my-God-they’re-really-calling-it-that “Vow Plus” fiasco from yesterday, readers.

We contemplated noting the absurdity of Gordon Brown being its frontman when he’s not standing in May and won’t be in Parliament to deliver it. We considered a forensic deconstruction showing how it’s just the same old reheated, uncosted rubbish they’ve been waffling around for the past years.

(“Give Holyrood control of housing benefit, separating it out from the rest of the UK’s Universal Credit by mumble mumble! Increase pensions using the extra cash freed up by mumble mumble! Devolve workfare, which somehow magically ‘creates jobs’ by mumble mumble! Pretend we just said ‘1000 nurses’ all along, not the demented ‘1000 more than anything the SNP say’!”)

We thought about pointing out all the comical flapping the party’s done around its devolution proposals, presenting the weary and confused Scottish people with feeble, grudging, underwhelming plan after feeble, grudging, underwhelming plan – at least five different ones since 2009 – and resentfully upping the offer by the bare minimum they think they can get away with every time.

And we wondered if it was worth drawing attention to the fact that the latest effort is actually basically the Strathclyde Commission blueprint from the Conservatives with a red sticker hastily slapped on it.

But in the end, the truth is a lot simpler than that.

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