Wings Over Scotland

From this morning’s Independent:

“‘Poll tax mark II’ pushes Britain’s poorest into debt

Up to 70,000 low earners, single parents, and disabled people are being pursued by bailiffs over their failure to pay the ‘new poll tax’, according to figures revealed for the first time.

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It’s not as if the Financial Times doesn’t have history with dropping great big payloads of high explosive into the middle of the independence debate late on a Sunday night. But a piece coming up in Monday’s edition (and online tonight) is going to choke a few breakfasts in London tomorrow morning.

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The following paragraph closes an article in today’s Observer.

“Kelly Gibson, 36, a homeless Big Issue seller on busy Sauchiehall Street, perhaps summed it up best: ‘I think that maybe we’ve got too much to lose. If they can’t explain to me how Scotland will be richer, how do I know that I will be better off?'”

We’re almost lost for words. But not quite.

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Sorry we haven’t posted much today, folks, but with a pulsating League Cup semi-final and then Scotland’s first game in the Six Nations (about which events we shall speak no more) it’s been a big day for sport. You know, this stuff:

We hate to be so petty and chippy, but after 40-odd years it wears you down. We’re pretty sure it’s a mistake they’ll stop making if we’re actually a proper country.

We were expecting the turnout for the No campaign’s Great Train Mobbery to be a lot better for the afternoon session, on account of the fact that nobody would have to get up at 6am to go and leaflet a dark, freezing-cold railway station.

The opposite turned out to be true.

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While we struggle through a tax return and our intrepid spotters document the second half of Better Together’s Big Train-Station Day Out, we figured you might like to read the Scottish Daily Mail’s story on the operation.

It’s a strange piece, opening with a dramatic “evil cybernat spies under the bed” headline and an opening paragraph about “sinister twists” and how we’re a “notorious abusive blog”, but then the remainder of the text twice repeats the point that we asked spotters not to harass anyone and that we’re merely challenging BT’s untruths.

It’s like their heart just wasn’t in the smear anymore.

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So we’ll just leave this here:

And then we’re off to bed.

[EDIT: Story confirmed with Jessica Bridges at Ladbrokes press office.]

As this site tends to focus mainly on the output of serious newspapers we haven’t previously spent a great deal of time scrutinising the Scottish Daily Mail, and we can only surmise that it’s upset them, because they seem to have been trying very hard this month to get our attention.

We must confess, it’s now become something of an addiction.

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The media is positively jumping with analyses of Mark Carney’s much-anticipated speech about currency unions, with thousands of words being expended to discuss something we’ve already summed up accurately in eleven. It’s almost comical to watch the amount of anti- (and very occasionally pro-) independence spin being put on a text which went pathologically out of its way not to make any kind of judgement whatsoever on the subject.

(Something Carney continued to do at the post-speech Q&A with journalists, at which he frequently looked bemused as a series of political hacks asked him massively leading questions along the lines of “So, you said X…” which he then had to wearily but firmly point out he hadn’t actually said at all. If you click the image below you can listen to an audio recording of the session.)

However much of an awful grump he is, the best, most sensible and balanced analysis (okay, the second-best after ours) is probably David Torrance’s.

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When studying the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, in truth one is spoiled for choice when considering the Scottish Daily Mail’s ongoing hate campaign against so-called “cybernats”.

It seems fair to say that the paper has blithely ignored Article 2, “A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for”, for example.

Articles 3 (i) (“Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications”) and 3 (iii) (“It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent”) also seem to have been somewhat cavalierly treated.

So we pretty much just stuck a pin in at random.

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The Mail is incredibly still banging away at its “evil cybernats” campaign today – we make that 19 days now – with another front page lead (this time, impressively somehow managing to turn SNP MSP Joan McAlpine being the victim of acts of online sabotage into an attack on the SNP) and another “Cybernat Watch” article inside.

One passage in an editorial, however, caught our eye. (Our emphasis.)

“It is not acceptable to make personal threats and insults under the guise of exercising the right to speak openly. It is an inescapable fact that while there are trolls on both sides, the so-called cybernats are more numerous, more vocal, more vituperative and act in consort.”

An “inescapable fact”? The Mail seems to have unaccountably failed to identify its material source. Who measured these things?  Can we have a link to the study data? Is there an internationally-recognised scale of vituperativeness? Is there a shred of evidence to back up the assertion that these alleged abusers “act in consort”?

Because if the Daily Mail doesn’t come forward with the proof of these allegations, and instead just continues making insulting comments and doorstepping, frightening and vilifying innocent members of the public for posting perfectly legal comments on the internet under their own names, it’ll be hard for the people of Scotland to arrive at any other conclusion than that the paper’s reporters are a bunch of bare-faced liars as well as bullies trying to selectively intimidate and silence one side of the debate.

There’s been a nice graphic going round social media this afternoon. It’s a map of Yes Scotland activist branches across the country, and it’s pretty impressive.

So for tonight’s And Finally, we thought it’d be a chuckle to compare it to the nearest “Better Together” equivalent, which has a rather less nationwide coverage.

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