Wings Over Scotland

Readers who haven’t recently suffered a blow to the head will probably recall that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was quoted in the Scotsman last week (in a story which WAS considered worthy of coverage), bitterly complaining that the Yes campaign had used the phrase “best of both worlds”, which for some reason he appeared to believe was his exclusive possession.

The fine gentleman above was pictured on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street on Saturday. He also appears to be toting some borrowed property. Can you spot it?

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Sweet mercy. We’ve been pretty scathing about the Scottish media over the last few days, but we had no idea that our jibes about the Scotsman in particular now being a spoof site were so literally true.

The image above comes from the Scotsman’s editorial leader accompanying its ridiculous Nate Silver decoy story this morning. We’ve highlighted a line for you.

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In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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We had a listen to Radio Scotland this morning again. We only caught the end of Good Morning Scotland, but we were still in time to catch them cramming in a piece on today’s comedy Scotsman headline about American psephologist Nate Silver and his vague, generalised comments about polling.

With an absolutely straight face (so far as you can tell on radio, anyway), the GMS presenter asked Silver for his view on “how well the media handles statistics”, while carefully steering the discussion in such a way that neither Silver nor fellow live guest Professor John Curtice had any opportunity to refer to the Panelbase poll commissioned by this site and published last week.

(We have no idea if either of them would have had any desire to, but the presenter’s questions carefully closed off any avenues which might have offered the chance.)

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(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)

We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.

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Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:

“Labour’s senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.

Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing.

It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”

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There’s one last bit of data from our poll that we haven’t revealed the results of yet. That’s because, unlike the rest of the survey, this one absolutely WAS a leading question. We asked it partly to satirise the ridiculously slanted nature of those used in some “Better Together” polls, such as this one, but also to make a more serious point.

If you’re looking forward to Wednesday’s game at Wembley, this one’s for you.

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The Scottish media has adopted a uniform silence over the results of last week’s Panelbase poll. We can simply accept that, or we can stand up and challenge it.

The BBC is funded by a compulsory tax, enforced by law. You pay for it to serve you. If you think it’s been abdicating its duty, why not ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” (presented by stand-in Louise Smith) this morning from 8.50am – lines actually open at 8am – and let them know how you feel about it?

By phone: 0500 92 95 00
By text: 80295
By email: callkaye@bbc.co.uk

Please be polite. If you call but don’t get on, or your text or email isn’t used, please tell us in the comments section below. (In the case of text or email, include a copy.)

When we commissioned our poll, we were about 50/50 in terms of whether the mainstream media would cover it. When the results came in, we cautiously shifted to 60/40 in favour. No matter how piqued the press was about this site’s scrutiny of it for the last year and a half, we reasoned, these results were dynamite and surely couldn’t be ignored by any journalist with a shred of conscience or dignity.

Who would have thought that we, of all people, could be guilty of so over-estimating the integrity and professionalism of Scotland’s newspapers and broadcasters?

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We learned yesterday, in perhaps not the most groundbreaking journalistic scoop of all time, that people don’t much trust politicians. While Scots were much more inclined to believe what they were told by the Yes campaign than the No one, the majority still thought they were being told more fibs than truth by everyone concerned.

What, then, of those whose job it is to scrutinise our politicians, dig down through all the spin and evasion for the facts and tell the public what they need to know?

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We thought we might as well take advantage of an excellent new facility revealed to us by an alert reader last night, whereby we can now link you to permanent full copies of web pages without directing traffic to the website in question or faffing around with awkward and flaky things like Google Cache.

Unsurprisingly totally ignoring yesterday’s dramatic poll revelations, the Scotsman’s big political story this morning is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall throwing a barely-believable playground tantrum about Alex Salmond saying some words that Mr McDougall likes to say.

You can read it, without earning the Scotsman any undeserved ad revenue, here.

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