Wings Over Scotland

This is what goes on behind the closed doors of invitation-only events run by the No campaign. Here, the former PM and self-proclaimed “ex-politician” lies through his teeth (again) to a Fife audience in June, presumably hoping they’ve by now forgotten his incompetent reign as Chancellor – the massive pensions raid, the cut-price sell-off of the nation’s gold, the ending of the 10p tax rate and all the rest, and the calamitous economic crisis he bequeathed to the nation:

Apparently oil revenues will be the sole source of money for an independent Scotland. No taxes at all. Apparently they’re only “£3 billion a year”, even though they’ve in fact NEVER been as low as £3bn since the Scottish Parliament existed and most sensible projections put receipts for the next few years at an average of at least twice that.

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Sir Ian Wood quoted in the Scotsman late last year:

“A radical overhaul of the North Sea oil industry can deliver a £200 billion injection to the economy over the next 20 years, a major report has concluded.

Oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood has led the biggest independent review of the North Sea oil and gas industry in its history, and said yesterday that production could increase by four billion barrels over coming years if major changes to the operation of the oil and gas sector are made.

Such changes would put the UK in a ‘stronger position’ to extract nearly all of the estimated 24 billion barrels still remaining underneath the North Sea.”

Unfortunately, since then there’s been a cataclysm.

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Remember, readers, saying the Scottish NHS is in danger from Westminster attacks on the English one is just a despicable and outrageous Nat scare story.

Alistair Darling and Alistair Carmichael wouldn’t lie to you, after all.

Folks, we seriously sometimes think we’re the only people covering Scottish politics who can actually read. Here’s a page from the Scottish Sun this morning:

The paper, last seen struggling to subtract 4 from 5, makes a big and rather huffy point about this apparently being “the first time” that the First Minister has “admitted” that independence won’t be a walk in the park, “with whisky and oil on tap”.

So we have to wonder what the heck they’ve been doing for the last 14 months.

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Earlier today we highlighted some rather ugly tweets (and retweets) from the No campaign’s latest “grassroots” star, Yvonne Hama of Airdrie, who’s apparently a big fan of the BNP’s Nick Griffin and the idea of hanging Catholics from trees.

Within hours of the revelations her Twitter accounts had all been deleted and her blog on the “Better Together” website and Facebook page removed, with a BT spokesman telling The Drum magazine that “views like this are completely unacceptable”.

So we imagine there were red faces all round when this happened just hours later.

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Perhaps the most notorious injustice ever committed by the UK government against Scotland (with the possible exception of the infamous “40% rule” in the 1979 devolution referendum in which the dead were counted as No votes) was the suppression for 30 years of the McCrone Report, which revealed how wealthy an independent Scotland would have been after the discovery of oil in the North Sea.

Successive Labour and Conservative governments at Westminster frantically fought to deceive Scots over the value of the bounty for decades. And now, on the eve of another referendum, it looks like they’re about to try it again.

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I’d waited a long time for an official independence meeting to take place in my home town of Stonehaven, so when I read on Monday morning that Better Together (or No Thanks or SNPSNPSNPBOOO! or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) were holding just such a thing at the town hall that evening, I bounded along Allardice Street with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

Why had it taken until just five weeks before the vote to have such a meeting? I wasn’t sure. But since the Commonwealth Games I’d seen a rise in the amount of Yes signs, posters, car stickers and flags in the town. Maybe Better Together decided it was time to do something. Which side would take claim Stonehaven’s finest creation – the deep fried Mars bar – as their own?

Considering I only found out about it on the day, I thought there’d be hardly anyone there, but to my surprise the town hall was bulging with comfy chairs. Maybe two thirds were full. I felt like I was back at school as almost everybody refused to sit in the first couple of rows for fear of… well, it turned out most of these people were feart beyond belief already.

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An alert reader notes an interesting choice of cutoff point on Reporting Scotland:

(From Friday 15 August, 11m 53s.)

From a leaflet sent out this week by Scotland’s only Tory MP, David Mundell:

“Do Keith and Michelle have a surname?”, nosy readers might be wondering.

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The Scottish and UK press has been more and more careless about disguising its bias as the referendum nears. Almost every paper, for example, reported without question the recent “Better Together” press release about being “inundated” with small donations after the first TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling.

Normally headlines would put the statement – which was completely unsubstantiated by the slightest scrap of evidence – inside quote marks or accompanied by qualifiers like “No camp claims”, but instead it was almost universally presented as fact.

“Better Together inundated with cash after debate” (The Guardian)

“Flood of donations sees Better Together hit campaign limit” (Daily Express)

“The official pro-UK campaign has publicly called for Scots to stop giving it money after a flurry of donations following Alex Salmond’s TV debate defeat.” (The Telegraph, slipping a sneaky wee bit of editorialising in too)

Calling for people to stop sending money was nothing more than a moderately clever PR stunt – the official No campaign already has more cash from millionaire Tory donors than it’s actually allowed to spend by September 18th, so there’s little point in continuing to accumulate it – but the papers obediently played along anyway.

The donations story, though, was essentially a piece of trivia. A much more serious matter was the Bank of England’s inflation report yesterday, and the embellishment and exaggeration applied to it by certain outlets revealed a great deal about publications which still officially claim to be neutral.

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With the referendum now just five weeks away and most of the polls still uncomfortably close, there’s an increasing sense of urgency and lack of subtlety about the No camp and media’s scaremongering.

Yesterday the Scottish media covered the award of a Royal Navy shipbuilding contract to BAE Systems in unequivocally political terms. “Promise of £348m shipyard contract for No vote”, blared the Scotsman, while the Scottish Sun’s front page went with “3 ships deal ‘if No vote’”. (The English edition was the rather more loquacious “Scots will land £348m Royal Navy contract – if they stay in the UK”.)

Yet the text of the articles told a radically different story.

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