Wings Over Scotland

We spent much of yesterday evening trying to actually track down the “vicious barrage” of vile cybernat abuse that Labour and “Better Together” activist Clare Lally says she was subjected to after being revealed to be rather less of an “ordinary” member of the public than the No camp presented her as at its recent Glasgow rally, and which has received wall-to-wall media coverage.

As yet, we’ve drawn a blank. We’ve made repeated requests, some to people who’ve contacted us angrily claiming to be her friends or family members, for evidence of any abusive comments at all. All have been met with an abrupt outbreak of silence.

Scotland 2014 devoted almost its entire 30-minute show to the issue last night. To depict the terrible onslaught, the above tweets were all they could come up with. The entire affair, readers might feel, is starting to smell distinctly piscine.

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The New Statesman has been doggedly ignoring all our polite requests to release the audio of its controversial interview with Alistair Darling for several days now, but today it very quietly released the full text of it on its website.

Where previously it had reported the “Better Together” leader as having made an “inaudible mumble” in response to a question about whether the SNP were guilty of “blood-and-soil nationalism”, apparently the mag had given its ears a good swabbing out with a cotton-bud and concluded that it HAD been able to hear him after all.

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The Times has a front-page lead this morning on the “Better Together” rally held in Glasgow yesterday, at which the official lead campaign group debuted its new “No Thanks” slogan. The article makes an interesting claim:

“[Alistair Darling] was the only politician to speak at the Better Together rally in Glasgow. All the others were ordinary men and women who had volunteered to talk about why they were campaigning to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.

They were led by Claire Lally, a mother from Clydebank, with a child with serious health problems. She said she would do all she could to save the United Kingdom and protect the health service that had saved her daughter.”

Well, that all seems legit.

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Launched amid much fanfare over a year ago, Scottish Labour’s ironically-named “2014 Truth Team” has been a source of great merriment to Yes supporters for many months. Having apparently run out of “truth” after just a few weeks of snarky tweets, the account had been silent since last summer, so imagine our surprise when it suddenly burst back into life today.

We say “back”, but in fact the Twitter account had been wiped clean as if it had never existed. All the old followers were still there, but now there were just four tweets, all of them advertising an exciting new feature on the Scottish Labour website entitled “The Top 20 Nationalist Assertions” and promising to “set out the facts” about them – the implication being, of course, that the assertions were untrue.

Fact-checking, eh? Well, that’s the sort of thing we just can’t resist.

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We got another letter from the government today. After a sudden outbreak of candour last week with regard to the civil service writing Buzzfeed articles, this is more the sort of thing we’re accustomed to from Freedom Of Information requests.

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There’s a considerable amount of uncertainty currently flying around on the internet with regards to Alistair Darling’s comments in an interview with the New Statesman which was published on the magazine’s website yesterday.

There seems to be no dispute that the “Better Together” leader compared Alex Salmond to dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, adding his name to the illustrious pantheon of assorted Unionist politicians and journalists who’ve likened Scotland’s democratically-elected First Minister to a series of genocidal murderers.

There is, however, something of a grey area around whether Mr Darling also accused the entire SNP of promoting “blood-and-soil nationalism” – an extremely offensive term normally used in reference to Nazi Germany, where it translated as “Blut und Boden”.

Well, let us clear that up for you. Yes, he did.

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We had an interesting chinwag with a very nice chap called David Phillips at the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier today. By the time he called we’d already managed to determine where the missing hundreds of millions had gotten to (a planned £400m cut to the Scottish defence budget from Westminster that oddly doesn’t get mentioned much when Unionists are telling us how we need to stay in the Union to protect defence jobs), but we did learn some other stuff.

Not unrelatedly, we thought it might be fun to list just a few of the factors in the IFS’s calculations of the finances of an independent Scotland that rely on being able to accurately predict the future – a skill at which governments and economists alike have, let’s say, a sub-optimal track record.

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After some nudging from us, YouGov have now slightly belatedly added the data tables and question text from their recent “Better Together”-commissioned poll on benefits and tax receipts to their website.

Strangely, none of the media reports of the poll mentioned the fact that in addition to quizzing Scots, the company asked the same set of questions* to full-sized samples of English and Welsh voters too. (Indeed, the samples for England and Wales were both bigger – 1051 Scots were polled, 1116 Welsh people and 1744 English.)

We don’t know why nobody cares about the opinion of the Northern Irish. But the data highlighted some interesting discrepancies, and one very surprising thing.

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Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.

(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)

We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.

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As we forced ourselves unwillingly through the full text of the Strathclyde Commission report in the name of professionalism this afternoon, it struck us that perhaps in our partisan haste we’d been just a tiny bit harsh on it.

After all, while the extension of tax powers is at best an empty charade and at worst an expensive millstone around the neck of the Scottish Government’s budget, and the proposals for devolving elements of welfare vague and highly unlikely to ever be implemented, there are a couple of recommendations that would, while minor in the context of Holyrood’s overall finances, at least be welcome.

Something nagged at the back of our mind, though.

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This morning’s papers are already full of reports about the contents of the Strathclyde Commission report, the Conservative counterpart to Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals. Embarrassingly for Johann Lamont, it looks as though the Tories are going to “outbid” Labour, the self-proclaimed “party of devolution”, with what are superficially greater powers for the Scottish Parliament on taxation.

And like much of the media’s coverage of the entire independence debate, the reporting to date is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland.

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We spend a lot of time on this site pulling the Scottish media up on its many and abysmal failings, so it’s only fair that when it occasionally gets something (largely) right we should offer it a little bit of praise and recognition.

And for once we’re not even being sarcastic when we say that, so let’s have a round of only slightly muted applause for this week’s Scottish Sun.

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