Wings Over Scotland

It’s been fascinating to watch the media slyly turning Chris and Colin Weir’s quite understandable objection to being defamed by loathsome right-wing newspapers and MSPs into an attack on “cybernats”.

But this morning Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph – who we rarely read even for laughs now, so far gone is his grasp on reality – added a particularly deft twist which we thought worthy of note for those who like to study how the press does its business.

And yes, we entirely meant that double entendre.

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Alert readers will have noticed that we’ve been studying the UK government’s latest independence paper today. The 24-page booklet comes with a foreword from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth promising that it contains “the positive case for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom”, so we thought it’d be fun to share some of our favourite snippets of positivity.

We could do with some cheering up.

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The Scotland Office has today released yet another taxpayer-funded (though we’re not allowed to know how much) document about how rubbish and useless Scotland is. Issued in the name of Alistair Carmichael, it reheats and repeats all the same lines from the previous papers, but this time dumbed down a bit for thickos.

You’d think that having been churning out the same thing for two years, the UK government would have at least managed to get its story straight by now.

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.

Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.

Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?

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Owen Jones in the Guardian, 8 May 2014:

“Despite being occasionally portrayed as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, Labour’s key policies are a mixture of backing Tory spending plans for a year, real-term cuts to public sector pay, restoring the 50p tax (apparently temporarily), a short-term energy bill freeze and more secure private-sector tenancy agreements.”

A real revolution to rally behind there, eh viewers?

We’ve never met Chris and Colin Weir, but judging by their actions alone, they’re the sort of people we should all aspire to be more like. Caring, decent and hard-working people all their lives, fate bestowed a great slice of fortune on them when they won £161m on the EuroMillions lottery in 2011.

Unlike others, they didn’t embark on an orgy of ostentatious consumption, decadence and waste. Shunning publicity, they enjoyed their windfall but also quietly got on with doing untold good for their local community, helping out their friends and family and neighbours. It’s doubtful we’ll ever know the full extent of their generosity. They’ve never sought recognition or thanks for the millions they’ve given away.

But at the very least, as a bare-minimum standard of humanity, they deserve better than to be traduced in the press by sewer-dwelling vermin like this:

The worthless fat trougher above is Alex Johnstone, a staunch defender of the bedroom tax who’s never managed to actually win an election in his own right but is nevertheless the Tory list MSP for North East Scotland, sponging off the taxpayer in the name of a democratic proportional representation that his party doggedly refuses to extend to the rest of the UK.

And what he did today is going to be the biggest test of our self-restraint in the 30 months since we started this website.

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With crushing predictability, the Scotsman today ran a “vile cybernats” story based around last week’s big thing, the fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” campaign group. Weaker even than the usual efforts, this one simply reported the group’s claims at face value, not bothering with so much as a single example of the alleged abusive posts.

“A campaign group launched last week in support of a No vote in the referendum says it has suffered a “virulent and nasty attack” from Nationalists since going public.

The Vote No Borders campaign has been forced to block comments from being left on its website, as a result of the onslaught.”

But while tidying up some tabs tonight, we happened to notice that we still had a VNB page open, with the first day’s comments intact. Just how bad were they?

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Update: the big pensions story of the day has now made it as far as the BBC. The Herald has also made its online version a bit more visible. No other media outlet, as far as we’ve spotted, has picked it up. It’ll be fascinating to see whether it gets covered on Reporting Scotland and Scotland Tonight in the next hour. [EDIT: No.]

Meanwhile, we thought you might like some more footage from the hearing.

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This article from yesterday hasn’t made it onto the Daily Record’s website. When people told us about it, we thought they were joking. When someone typed the text out by hand and emailed it to us, we thought they were making it up. We had to get someone to scan the page for us before we believed it was real.

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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Anyone who really wanted to know the score when it came to pensions was already aware of the facts. For well over a year, the DWP has been telling people who asked that they would continue to receive their UK state pension regardless of the outcome of the referendum. So that’s reassuring.

But for some unfathomable and mysterious reason, the explanation for which defies all known science, that information hasn’t really made it into the independence debate. “Better Together” has felt absolutely free to continue scaremongering about it, with Alistair Darling saying as recently as last month “On the subject of pensions, what happens with separation? Nobody knows – certainly not the Scottish Government.”

So we were a little surprised last night when a piece in the Scotsman broke ranks.

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