Wings Over Scotland

Tell you what, readers – say what you like about the Daily Mail, but you certainly can’t accuse them of not really going for it once they get an idea into their heads.

These are all just from the last week or so, and there’s more to come. The paper has been going around doorstepping random pro-independence tweeters for what we presume is going to be quite a sizeable feature any day now (we declined their offer to send a hack and photographer round, but answered a few questions by email, as much for the sheer curiosity of seeing how they’d twist them as anything else).

And the “Cybernat Watch” column is now our favourite start to the day.

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The Daily Mail is proving an even more consistent source of comedy than usual of late, nowhere more so than its superb “Cybernat Watch” column (which we were delighted to find ourselves in this morning, on only its second day). Today the collection of partial, out-of-context quotes from random tweets was nestled into a bizarre piece about Labour’s shadow something, Jim Murphy.

As with most articles from the Mail’s Scottish edition it isn’t available online, but we’ve attached the text below so you can digest the full disturbing madness.

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If it’s Thursday, it must be foreigners. Today’s terror attack on the independence movement is an attempted pincer movement, themed (again) around the dire menace posed to us by those swarthy, primitive, untrustworthy devils who don’t even speak the Queen’s English. And no, Glaswegian readers, we don’t mean people from Dundee. We’re talking about the ones from other countries.

Because not only do some of these unspeakable aliens want to come and work and make a life in our green and pleasant land, they also want to bomb it and kill us all.

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The front page of this morning’s Telegraph.

We can’t decide which part we’re the most proud of.

The headline above comes, with a small twist of artistic licence, from Philip Larkin’s brilliant poem ‘Toads’, and it’s easy to believe it if you should ever find yourself reading the Mail Online website. Those paddling in its perfumed waters would be forgiven for thinking Earth a bright, spangly place full of luscious women and rich men.

There are no heavier concerns in this world than which fad diet to try or whether the latest spray tan products give an even glow. We can read about how the fashion for the ‘scouse brow’ is so over, and then there’s that famous woman who married that famous man. There are popstars and juice bars and babies in mini-Gucci. All is well.

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Today’s release of the 2013 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey results provided an interesting pair of stats. Scottish people told pollsters ScotCen that they’d favour independence by a very big margin (52% to 30%, or 63 to 37 excluding Don’t Knows) if they could be assured that they’d be personally £500 a year better off.

However, if merely assured that they’d be neither better nor worse off that they are now, the No vote narrowly came out on top, by (again excluding DKs) 54 to 46. An obvious question therefore presented itself: just how big a bribe do Scots need to take responsibility for their own country?

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It’s a start, we suppose. But it doesn’t take long for the UK government’s latest independence “fact sheet” to start telling fibs again. It barely gets a quarter of the way through its very first sentence before dropping a big old porky on those assembled:

Much as we’d like to think otherwise, there’s no such thing as a “forever decision” in politics. Whether Scotland votes for or against independence, it could change in the future. The USSR fragmented, East and West Germany reunited (having been abruptly split up after the “Thousand Year Reich” only actually managed 12), and even our own lifetimes have seen countless realignments and redivisions of states across the world.

So what else in the paper is, to use the technical term, total cobblers?

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Welcome to another glorious new dawn in the Union.

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We doubt if anyone is going to faint with amazement from the discovery that an academic study has found TV news coverage of the independence debate was biased against the Yes side by a 3-2 margin between September 2012 and September 2013.

But what’s useful about the University of West of Scotland research is that it sets out the exact nature of the various types of biases, and gives a precise number for how many times each type occurred. This moves us on considerably, because complaints can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than (to misquote Derek Bateman) the paranoia of nationalists obsessing over how many times Jackie Bird raises her left eyebrow while reading from an autocue.

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We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:

“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”

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Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, just discovered:

“It’s such a pity that nobody knows any history, or it would be quite obvious what so-called Scottish ‘Independence’ is about. Our continental enemies sought for centuries to detach Scotland from England, to weaken us. Now they’re doing it again. 

If Scotland breaks away from England, it won’t be run from Edinburgh, but from Brussels and Frankfurt, and Scots will discover what it’s really like to be someone else’s subject province. I’m sure they’ll have more sense.”

God DAMN it! Who knew we were just the unwitting dupes of the Belgians all along?

Step 1: Write an offensive, provocative piece of trollbait for the Daily Mail, describing your opponents as “kilted bum-barers who bellow ‘freedom’ whenever an English person hoves into view” and suggesting that a Yes vote is an abdication of morality.

(If you can then somehow get the Guardian to reprint it, bonus!)

Step 2: Whine like a baby when you get the response you wanted all along.

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