Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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?

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Tomorrow: “‘Eat that pie and you’ll get fat’, says Pickles”.

We’ve just endured Gordon Brown’s 45-minute “old man shouting out a series of random unconnected facts from Wikipedia” speech at Glasgow University. (You should be able to find it later on the iPlayer under the programme title “Briefings”, if you really want to.) It doesn’t bear a lot of analysis, being just the same old cobblers you’ve heard a thousand times before, but delivered in a more rambling manner.

There was one vaguely interesting thing about the event, though.

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… they think you are.

(UK edition on the left, Scottish edition on the right.)

Even the faithful Scottish media can scarcely rouse itself to hype up Gordon Brown’s latest lumbering “intervention” in the independence debate this morning. The Scotsman buries the story in a corner of page 5, below a big spread about the ongoing implosion of CBI Scotland, and it doesn’t make the Herald’s online front page at all.

(Indeed, even in the paper’s “Referendum News” section it’s only story #6, below the CBI, more attacks on Alistair Darling’s leadership of the No campaign and a vile piece of “FOREIGNERS!” dog-whistle politicking from Labour nonentity Gregg McClymont.)

It’s not too hard to work out why.

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From today’s Herald:

“Both sides of the independence debate will attempt to win over undecided voters this week with poster campaigns as senior Coalition sources admitted they have to have a more ‘explicitly’ positive pro-Union message.

The Tory-LibDem Government rejected accusations that its campaign is on the wrong track or scaremongering but a government source said: ‘We need to be more explicit about the fact that we are being positive in our message. 

Most of what we say is very positive, but it is the negative parts that are currently attracting attention. We need to be more overt about how positive we are actually being.'”

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There are a couple of opinion polls in the papers this morning, of which independence campaigners are naturally paying most attention to the ICM one for Scotland on Sunday which shows referendum voting at a hair’s-breadth 48% Yes to 52% No (after removing Don’t Knows).

But perhaps more revealing is one in the Sunday Telegraph regarding the imminent European elections, which puts Labour on 30%, UKIP on 27%, the Tories on 22% and the Lib Dems – the only actively Europhile party south of Scotland – on just 8%.

If you apply those figures to the electorate of the rUK, excluding Scotland, that means that there are something like 11.3 million UKIP voters in England, as opposed to a total Scottish electorate of 4 million.

Readers may wish to consider for a moment which of those groups is likely to have a stronger influence on the direction of UK politics in the coming years.

The estimable James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop! wrote an excellent blog post the other day deconstructing a laughably skewed and leading poll which was commissioned by “Better Together” this month.

Blair McDougall’s Beleaguered Billy Boys, as hardly anyone calls them, had loudly and bizarrely trumpeted figures which actually showed a 6% swing to Yes, but that wasn’t the thing we found most interesting in their press release.

“In what is another blow to the SNP, just 35% of those questioned by YouGov on behalf of Better Together backed separation over a stronger Scottish Parliament within the UK.”

The poll question had in fact offered respondents a forced choice between two options: independence or “Scotland remaining part of the UK with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament”. (Which meant, among many other quirks which made the findings nonsensical, that the roughly 10% of people who want Holyrood abolished altogether got lumped in with the “increased powers” side as the least-worst option.)

We’ve already learned what BT mean by “increased powers” – the piddly and trivial ones enshrined by the Scotland Act 2012, rather than any dramatic new settlement from any of the Unionist parties, but the jarring part of the release is the twisting of that already-twisted wording to mean “stronger”.

Because a stronger Scottish Parliament is the LAST thing the No parties want, and you only have to spend a minute thinking about it to figure out why.

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This is the new “positive” campaign poster from “Better Together”:

There’s a lie in the picture, but it’s probably not the one you think.

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The Scottish media displays such a remarkable uniformity of thought when it comes to the independence debate that you’d think it’d be the easiest thing in the world for them to at least all get their story straight when they launch a smear campaign against a prominent Yes figure.

That, however, would presuppose that they weren’t also incompetent.

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