Alert readers will be familiar with a phenomenon we often like to highlight in these pages – that of the dramatic newspaper headline which rapidly turns into something completely different by the time you read the text of the story.
There’s an especially fine example in today’s Telegraph.
Alert readers will be aware that this site spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out how few and how trivial are the actual political differences between the three UK parties. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all basically offer slightly tweaked and rebadged versions of the same centre-right policies, in an unhealthy consensus set in concrete by the UK’s undemocratic electoral system.
There does, however, remain one major issue on which there’s still clear blue water between the only two parties who might provide the next UK Prime Minister, and it’s one that’s a lot more important to the independence debate than is generally thought. Have you guessed what it is yet?
The transcript below is taken from a public meeting hosted by the Scottish Office at Murrayfield in Edinburgh last Thursday (24 April), featuring Alistair Carmichael.
You can listen for yourself by clicking the above image.
Anyone involved in the independence debate for any length of time will probably already have lost count of how many times they’ve heard the plaintive we-cannae-dae-it wail of “But how will you pay for all of Alex Salmond’s milk and honey promises?”
So here’s a clue.
We absolutely love the fact that only one of the stories in the “Referendum News” section of the Herald website this morning is headlined in all capitals:
It paints a rather lovely picture of everyone at the “Better Together” HQ running around shouting “THERE IS NO PANIC! EVERYONE HERE IS TOTALLY CALM!” at the tops of their voices to anyone in the general vicinity.
But there’s something less amusing about the very short piece.
The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.
Because those are flying about all over the place.
We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.
But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.
We suppose we have to credit “Better Together” with SOME intelligence after all. It seems they’ve finally and belatedly learned that Tory ministers coming up and lecturing Scotland is a counter-productive business, so this week they sent Gordon Brown in to do Iain Duncan Smith’s dirty work for him, by issuing dire warnings about the cost of welfare in an independent Scotland using figures helpfully fed to him by IDS’s Department for Work and Pensions.
But the UK government also released, with rather less fanfare, some other figures about pensions this week that didn’t reflect quite as well on the Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister.
This clip comes from yesterday’s “Good Morning Scotland”, around 2h 35m in.
It features Professor Paul Collier, who is apparently the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and therefore an obvious choice for the BBC as a go-to guy on the subject of Scottish politics.
We think you’ll find it a stimulating and thought-provoking opinion.
Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.
The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.
Remember how the No campaign was definitely going to be much more positive from now on, pushing a feelgood “sunshine strategy” to persuade Scots that the UK was the best of both worlds?
Let’s see how that’s going, shall we?
Tomorrow: “‘Eat that pie and you’ll get fat’, says Pickles”.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
