Wings Over Scotland

Whenever there’s a discussion of women’s voting intentions in the referendum, it’s striking how quickly it all slides into stereotyping. Maybe that’s inevitable when you set out to examine the collective motivations of a group of diverse individuals who basically have one characteristic in common. Sometimes it feels like asking what all red-haired or right-handed people think.

Attempting to speak for all women, then, is a bit like herding cats. So let’s not try.

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We were struck by a curious vision when watching Thursday’s edition of Scotland Tonight. The show bizarrely chose to focus its attention on the manufactured outrage about Elliot Bulmer’s article for the Herald, with the alleged serious criminal offence which led to the “revelation” reduced to a minor incidental footnote.

And we found ourselves wondering what would have happened if the producers had gotten their scripts mixed up, and treated the other big news story of the day – the conviction of MSP Bill Walker for a string of domestic assaults on family members between 1967 and 1995 – the way it handled the Yes Scotland hacking story.

We think it might have gone a bit like this.

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We had an interesting discussion on Twitter this afternoon with the Guardian’s Severin Carrell. As a result, we decided to check something out that we hadn’t seen anyone be clear about, and the upshot is that we can now confirm, from what we’ll call “an extremely well-placed source”, that the Herald was fully aware, every step of the way, that Elliot Bulmer’s piece had been commissioned by Yes Scotland, and that it was submitted to the Herald through Yes Scotland.

It was, therefore, solely and exclusively the Herald’s responsibility to disclose, or not disclose, anything and everything to do with the article’s provenance that it considered pertinent. The Herald chose to publish the piece (having no obligation to do so). The Herald knew precisely where it came from and by what route. The Herald chose not to mention the Yes Scotland connection (which it was also under no obligation to do). Yes Scotland, and Elliot Bulmer, hid nothing from anyone.

Them’s the facts. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. That is all.

So, to the elephant in the room, then. Certain elements of the Scottish press are busting a gut today in an attempt to fabricate a scandal around a man writing some honest opinions in a newspaper for money.

Judging by the tone of the coverage, it seems they have a case, in so far as that Scottish newspapers are plainly no place for honesty.

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We try very very hard not to be crude on this website. But sometimes you’ve just got to bite the bullet and point out that someone’s a completely boneheaded moron who shouldn’t be sent out for bread and milk without grown-up supervision, let alone given a senior political position in what was once a respectable major party.

Margaret Curran wants to be Secretary of State for Scotland.

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We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.

We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.

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As we were forced to consider Labour’s “One Nation” policy again today, we couldn’t help thinking back to something that happened in London just a week ago.

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There’s a rather horrible article by Margaret Curran in the Scotsman today. (No real news there.) It’s a combination of empty noise and ugly smears about the pursuit of independence – an attempt to engage directly with the rest of the world in our own right – being xenophobic and inward-looking and all the usual rubbish.

But we thought it might be interesting to take a look at a single paragraph, examine it forensically and see what it was actually saying. We chose one from near the end, because to be honest we’d be amazed if anyone else had actually had the fortitude to wade that far through Curran’s  plodding, will-sapping prose.

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An alert reader (what would we do without them?) sent us this interesting graph today:

It comes from a page on the website of a heating-oil supplier, and had both our reader and ourselves scratching our heads trying to explain it. Scotland is an oil-producing nation, and almost all of the UK’s oil comes ashore and is refined in Scotland. It has less distance to travel to get to customers in Scotland than anywhere else.

So why do Scots, consistently and by a strikingly large margin, pay the most for it?

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The Scotsman goes big this morning on a story revealing that John Swinney has admitted accidentally misinterpreting a report from Lloyds Banking Group which said that the oil and gas industry would create 34,000 new jobs in the UK over the next two years. A Scottish Government paper in July originally said the jobs would all come to Scotland, but the error was corrected within three days.

While most papers give the issue a couple of short lines, the Scotsman runs the news twice, once in a substantial article of its own and also (for some reason we can’t quite fathom) as a sizeable addendum tacked onto its lead story about Henry McLeish criticising the relentless negativity of the No campaign.

The Scotsman is quite right to highlight this embarrassing clanger. After all, what sort of hapless bumbling idiot could have published something which misinterpreted the Lloyds report as referring to solely Scottish jobs?

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Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran is quoted in the Herald today presenting the award of £300m of contracts for the navy’s innovative new aircraft-free aircraft carriers as a benefit of the Union, and continuing the well-worn scare story that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards would close in an independent Scotland.

We’ve already dealt with that particular canard, so instead let’s look at the sums.

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Even moderately alert readers will recall our expressing slight concern on Saturday at the recent disappearance of a page from the Scottish TUC website, in which the trade-union organisation outlined its view that the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system would result in a net loss of thousands of jobs in Scotland – a position which is strongly at odds with that of the Labour Party.

So we were relieved to be contacted on Sunday evening by the STUC’s Deputy General Secretary, Dave Moxham, who confirmed that the Congress’s opinion hadn’t changed, and that its full analysis could still be found here.

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