This is Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Eddie Bone of the Campaign for an English Parliament in a remarkable nine minutes of “Good Morning Scotland” this morning.
It’s the nearest to sounding like a Yes voter you’ll ever hear James Naughtie. Enjoy.
We’ve been so busy with the Wee Blue Book for the past week or so that we only just got round to listening to last Tuesday’s interview with Alistair Darling on Good Morning Scotland in time, before it vanished from the iPlayer. The former Chancellor gets a quite uncomfortable ride from presenter Gary Robertson, and flaps angrily for much of the ten-and-a-half minutes trying to turn every question into one on currency.
Mr Darling also makes some startlingly and empirically false statements throughout the interview, and we thought it’d be worth noting a few of them and seeing if they crop up on tonight’s BBC1 debate with the First Minister.
It turns out that Jackie Baillie heard this and thought it was a referendum broadcast.
Silly old Jackie, eh readers?
Alert readers will be aware that even in a campaign characterised by dishonesty, the ever-smirking Labour MSP Jackie Baillie has carved a reputation for especially notable creativity with the truth. With our hands on our hearts, we don’t think we’ve ever heard her say anything that wasn’t a lie. However, on last night’s The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4, we believe she reached a spectacular personal best. Have a listen.
If you can’t quite believe your ears, we’ll transcribe that for you.
An alert reader was listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning when they heard something unexpected that made them sit up and take notice. It came as part of a segment on Northern Irish people living in Scotland, 45 minutes into the show, and was stated in passing as an unremarkable statistic by BBC reporter Andy Martin.
We’ve isolated it for you – click the image above to listen to the short 13-second clip. (The full six-minute piece can be found here for when it expires on iPlayer.)
In case you somehow carelessly missed it, here’s the nine-minute-or-so segment from last night’s “The Westminster Hour” on Radio 4, in which dear old Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph and I discussed the tone and tenor of the independence debate.
The fascinating thing was how Cochrane started off essentially claiming that the entire thing was an intolerable horror, but but by the end was agreeing that it was actually surprisingly mild and civilised as these things go, and needed to continue in exactly the same manner it was now. Funny old cove.
An angry Dennis Canavan gets stuck into Ian Murray, the Labour MP who calls the police when someone puts a sticker on his window, on “Good Morning Scotland”.
For our money the most telling part is when Murray bleats about the SNP proposing a cut to Corporation Tax, and Canavan quite rightly points out the hypocrisy given that Labour reduced it twice when last in power and pledged to reduce it even further as soon as possible, Murray runs away from the issue without addressing it, but then has the brass neck to bring it up again at the end.
If you missed it, today’s John Beattie show featuring Hamish Macdonell and myself:
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.
For the sake of our blood pressure we don’t normally tune in to Radio Scotland’s weekday phone-in show, but as Lallands Peat Worrier was on it today we stayed with it for a few minutes, and found ourselves getting increasingly annoyed as presenter Kaye Adams asked caller after caller if they thought Barack Obama’s comments on independence yesterday (in so far as he actually made any) had been “off the cuff”.
We knew they hadn’t been, so we rang up just to keep the record straight.
We wanted to have Obama’s awkward, halting delivery on file anyway, so this’ll do.
The week-long media frenzy that would have surrounded the Scottish Government releasing a key set of figures about independence, only to have them immediately and pointedly disowned by their cited sources as gross distortions misrepresenting the reality by a factor of 12, doesn’t bear thinking about.
(Remind yourself of the 10 desperate days they dragged out of some spectacularly innocuous comments about Vladimir Putin and multiply that by about a thousand.)
The one-sided national embarrassment that is the Scottish media, however, has done its level best to completely bury the wholly-justified anger of Professors Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Robert Young of Western Ontario University.
Neither of the country’s current-affairs TV shows gave the matter more than the most cursory passing mention, nor did most of its newspapers. You’ll search in vain for a story about it in the Guardian, and the Scotsman actually managed to hide its two paragraphs of coverage deep inside pieces attacking the SNP.
A promised interview with Professor Dunleavy on “Good Morning Scotland” never materialised, but the distinguished academic DID eventually surface on Wednesday’s edition of “Newsdrive”. If you click the image above you can listen to the seven-minute slot in its entirety, and wonder just how outrageously the defenders of the Union would have to act to make the front pages of a Scottish newspaper.
This is a lengthy piece of audio at 64 minutes, but we recommend it highly.
The man speaking is Neil Walsh, who’s the Pensions Officer of the Prospect trade union (scientists, engineers, professionals). The recording is of a conference call that he conducted for the union’s members this week dealing with the ramifications of independence for, funnily enough, pensions.
Prospect is a UK-wide union with a position of complete neutrality on the referendum, and no sides are taken. All you’ll hear is an Irishman with no dog in the indyref fight calmly and rationally assessing the issues from the perspective of his 140,000 members and their interests.
It may be the sanest and most reasonable thing you hear in the entire independence debate. If you’re worried about your pension, or you know someone who is, you need to listen to it, and the sooner the better.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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