Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.
We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.
Yesterday we ran a couple of features examining the sort of people the Yes campaign needs to convince if it’s to win the referendum in just over a year’s time, and how it might go about tackling that job. Today saw the release of a series of polls from Tory peer Lord Ashcroft that demonstrate just how big a challenge that’s going to present.
Because it’s not that the results show an electorate deeply committed to the Union (although they do suggest a large No majority, albeit from polling which was conducted as much as almost seven months ago), but because they illustrate just how little voters currently know about anything.
As we’ve already noted today, those who don’t currently support independence can be split into two groups: those who can be persuaded to support it, and those who can’t.
For the purposes of winning the referendum it’s important to be able to tell the difference between the two, so as to avoid wasting time trying to convert the non-convertible, and spend our time instead on those who can be persuaded to vote Yes.
Scotland on Sunday this week carries a piece interviewing No voters to find out why they’re currently intending to keep Scotland governed by Westminster (following on from a similar article about Yes supporters last week). It’s an interesting snapshot of both diehards and people who could yet be turned round.
Let’s take a look and see who we’re dealing with.
Norway is a country with a slightly smaller population than Scotland, with more difficult territory and climate. It discovered oil in its territorial waters at the same time as Scotland, and in broadly similar quantities. While Scotland’s standard of living is in freefall, like that of the rest of the UK, due to Tory austerity cuts brought about in large part by Labour’s spectacular failure to tackle inequality in “boom” times, this is how our neighbours across the North Sea are doing:
“Norway, which goes to the polls tomorrow, faces a strange problem: too much money. The Nordic country, an island of prosperity in ailing Europe, faces an embarrassment of riches as it tries to figure out how to spend its huge pile of oil money without damaging the economy in the long run.”
Better Together? The best of both worlds? Yeah, right.
This just in: Labour policy clarification on the bedroom tax, from the horse’s mouth.
(No, really. We’re not being satirical, although they might be.)
It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.
The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.
It was only a matter of time.
Last night’s debate, as seen by studio pundits Bernard Ponsonby and Colin Mackay.
We can only commend STV on its generous supplies of green-room hospitality.
Anas Sarwar’s boorish embarrassment of a performance on last night’s STV debate doesn’t deserve a post of its own, frankly. As the Glasgow MP who thinks Scotland is a dictatorship oafishly shouted idiotic slogans over the top of Nicola Sturgeon non-stop for 45 minutes, all we could hear were the same old hollow canards Labour have been repeating for months on end, and which haven’t changed a bit in all that time.
So rather than expend any effort on debunking them again, here’s an encore.
Almost every newspaper today reported a declaration by George Osborne that a No vote would result in a boost to Scottish family incomes of a dramatic-sounding £2,000. The headline figure, which some papers gave a more negative spin, was actually a cumulative sum spread over 30 years (because “£67 a year per family”, or £1.29 a week, sounds rather less impressive as a compelling case for the Union).
It hinged on forecast economic growth of 4% – due to “extra trade, labour migration and cross-border investment” – compared to that in an independent Scotland.
Those are two pretty sweeping predictions. Is the Chancellor that good a fortune-teller?
There’s something subtly different about the wording of these two Scotsman headlines.
Well, not very subtle. Can you spot it, readers? Tell us your answers in the comments.
We’ve been hearing tales today of people who signed up for the top secret “public meeting” of No Glasgow yesterday and received written confirmation that their application had been successful, but were then mysteriously refused admission when they arrived – a curious occurrence when by most accounts there were 70-80 seats going begging in the 400-seater auditorium.
We, naturally, had about 50 spies in the room, one of whom audio-recorded the entire thing. We’re still plugging our way through it – it’s hard to maintain focus when the tired old platitudes you’ve heard a hundred times already drone on and on from the stage, and we keep finding we’ve forgotten we’re listening and have wandered off to do the hoovering or something.
By far the most compelling argument we’ve heard so far, though, came from a gentleman in the audience. It’s transcribed below. Take a moment to read it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
