Wings Over Scotland

While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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This is the latest cinema ad from fake-grassroots campaign group “Vote No Borders”:

And below is why it’s a despicable, shameful lie.

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Another UKIP voter. This one’s a bit more interesting.

Because the thing about UKIP is that – by their own admission – they don’t actually have any policies about anything other than cracking down on immigration and leaving the EU. Their official position is that the rest of their manifesto is blank paper, to be formulated on all other subjects at their summer conference.

Yet even in the complete absence of any other policies, voters are happy to tell TV cameras that the party “their political agenda suits my opinions”.  What does that tell us? It tells us what the 2015 UK general election will be fought on, and it’s not Ed Miliband’s “cost of living crisis”.

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Dear God. It’s now almost two and a half years since this site first comprehensively debunked and disproved the notion that Scottish independence would give the Conservatives a permanent majority in the rUK parliament, in an article that’s been read many tens of thousands of times here and spread far and wide elsewhere.

So you’ll forgive us if we spend a few minutes smashing our heads against a brick wall in despair at the mind-bleeding idiocy of some slobbering, sponge-witted poltroon quoted at length in the Telegraph today.

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When I speak at independence events I introduce myself as the ‘token English guy’. It’s invariably received in the spirit it’s intended. Throughout my 18 years in Scotland, there’s always been plenty of banter, but pals from England have often asked if things sometimes go beyond the joking stage. Does it ever turn ugly?

I’ve always found this quite amusing, but it should always be remembered that there are many south of the border still convinced that Glasgow is three notches down from 1980s Beirut. Years of apocalyptic films and hard-man dramas have filled their souls with terror at the idea of getting off the train at Glasgow Central and walking fifty yards into the deadly streets outside.

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One of the long-term goals of Wings Over Scotland is to put itself out of a job. By teaching people how to read newspapers in such a way as to understand what they’re NOT telling you, and to be wise to methods they use to create completely false ideas while not actually saying anything untrue, one day we’ll hopefully reach a situation where there’s no need for us to exist and we can go on holiday or something.

There’s a nicely subtle example of the craft of malicious spin in today’s Scottish Daily Mail, but it also sharply illustrates another toxic aspect of the media’s coverage of the independence debate – the rise of the phantom.

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And it appears we’ve found Torcuil Crichton’s.

It seems there’s to be no let-up in the Unionist/media campaign of vilification against Chris and Colin Weir – or “the Rich List Weirs”, as a nasty little comment piece by the Daily Record hack in today’s issue calls them. Let’s study those 51 sour wee words.

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Since we’re (reluctantly) talking about the odious and hateful side of the independence debate today, here’s crusading socialist MP and No campaigner George Galloway of the Respect party, retweeting a troll account depicting Chris and Colin Weir as a couple of fat pigs standing around in filth.

And on this occasion, the retweet IS an endorsement.

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It’s been another one of those weekends when the independence debate has taken a bit of a nasty turn. Whether it’s the Sunday Times stirring up Anglo-Scottish tensions (deliberately or otherwise), the Daily Mail running supposedly comic articles that are just an orgy of Scottish self-loathing, or Tory councillors making menacing-sounding threats against us personally, it’s been a grim 48 hours for fans of civilised discourse.

And we can’t in all conscience say that much of it looks like an accident.

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The tweet below was posted earlier this morning by Conservative councillor for East Renfrewshire Gordon McCaskill. We’ve asked him to clarify what it means, but at the time of writing no response has been forthcoming.

The comment was made in the context of the Sunday Herald reporting that Wings Over Scotland would be registering with the Electoral Commission as a “permitted participant” for the referendum campaign. Among other things, that will mean making our address public on the EC’s register and all campaign literature.

It’s somewhat disturbing that that fact has been the trigger for Cllr McCaskill issuing ominous-sounding warnings about being unable to “hide” from “sound and fury”.

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Referendum polls now seem to be arriving on a daily basis, but this morning sees the appearance of two that offer some rather striking contrasts in more than one sense.

The less interesting, despite showing a remarkable swing of 5% to the No side, is an ICM one for Scotland on Sunday, which the paper gets predictably excited about and illustrates with an extreme close-up of a No activist with his face plastered in “Better Together” stickers (despite the man seeming to be in his 50s) and contorted into a provocative, mocking sneer.

The more unsettling one, however, is in the Sunday Times.

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An alert reader directed us to this document this morning:

“The reasons for the high Scottish mortality between 1950 and 1980 are unclear, but poverty and deprivation linked to particular industrial employment patterns, poor housing and unhealthy cultural and behavioural patterns seem the more likely explanations.

From 1980 onwards the mortality pattern changed and this seems most likely to be attributable to the changed political context, produced by neoliberal political attack, and the consequent hopelessness and community disruption experienced in Scotland and Glasgow.”

It’s a 2011 study by the non-political Glasgow Centre for Population Health, which attempts to discern why Scotland, and particularly Glasgow, has such appalling life expectancies compared to the rest of the UK. And its findings are startling.

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