“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”
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The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.
Last week we dropped the Electoral Commission a short line to see if there’d been any progress in their investigation into our revelations of last December about the extremist loongroup Scotland In Union’s funding. Today we got a reply:
So just to clarify: an organisation whose specific stated purpose is to fight elections, and which has been a registered campaigner in several general elections, spending tens of thousands of pounds at a time, has raised over £600,000 in mainly large donations from wealthy and secretive donors since 2015 – a period where there has hardly ever NOT been an election going on in which spending and donations were regulated – and yet not one single penny of it has been declarable income.
That’s… interesting. We’ve asked the EC if any further detail will be forthcoming.
There was (unintentionally, we presume) a very revealing turn of phrase used by Tory MEP Jacqueline Foster on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland:
“Scotland held a referendum on independence a couple of years earlier, and if the Scots had won that referendum to leave the United Kingdom, they’d have left the European Union.”
We suppose it’s nice that even the Tories finally agree that Scotland lost by voting No. But it’s interesting to hear that apparently there has never been any way for Scots to stay in the EU – if they voted Yes in 2014 they were out, if they voted No in 2014 they were out, and even though they voted Remain in 2016 they’re going out.
Any fair-minded democrat would surely then accept that Scotland’s voters deserve one chance to actually make that choice in a meaningful way, no?
With regard to this, some important commentary:
(And some more.)
The text in the image below might be the scariest words we’ve ever read.
If you’re not sure why, read a little closer.
We’re at the halfway point of our 2018 fundraiser, and the all-sources total so far is a thumpingly impressive £103,266 in just two weeks. But while that’s a tremendous sum, it’s sobering too.
Firstly because with an average monthly readership of nearly 304,000 people it comes to an average contribution of slightly under 30p per reader. As with most crowdfunded ventures, fewer than 1% of the site’s users have actually backed it financially so far.
And secondly because for perspective, the average Scottish adult – independence supporters included – sends the BBC about £72 a year. (£323m from 4.5m adults.)
While obviously a minority of folk do boycott the licence fee, that still means that the average Wings reader gives the BBC 240 times as much money every year as they give Wings to fight it.
And as well as its own output, which is hugely financially incentivised in favour of the Union, the BBC is now using your money to directly fund Scottish newspapers hostile to independence by paying them to hire more reporters.
(It’ll then also massively amplify those hostile voices by featuring them on multiple daily “papers review” shows from which online media with readerships many times bigger are arbitrarily excluded, enabling the anti-independence outlets to dictate the political news agenda every day without having to sell a single copy.)
So, y’know, it’s a tough job.
We’ve been scouring our picture archives all afternoon for something more surprising than the fact that the UK government has screwed over the Scottish fishing industry again after it voted Brexit and Tory in 2016 and 2017, and we found this one.
See also: literally anything else that has ever happened on Earth.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
