Wings Over Scotland

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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Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:

“Prof Jim Gallagher understands the intricacies of picking and choosing powers to be devolved. He was secretary of the Calman Commission, whose recommendation formed the basis of the Scotland Act, and has co-authored a book about what will happen after the referendum.

According to Prof Gallagher, the idea of Scotland winning some version of ‘devo max’ in the aftermath of a no vote is fantastical. The term as understood by most people is ‘just independence light’ and will never be accepted by Westminster.”

Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.

We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.

And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.

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While the Scottish print media continues to almost totally blank our Panelbase opinion poll, it’s nice to know that they’re nevertheless paying close attention to its findings.

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We’ve already noted part of Willie Rennie’s appearance on Newnight Scotland this week, reinforcing the strange phenomenon by which the Unionist parties continue to suggest that an independent Scotland would be a dictatorial state more reminiscent of Zimbabwe than a modern western democracy with a proportionally-elected parliament.

But the full transcript of the segment (provided by our excellent and much-valued new transcribing department) adds a little meat to the bones. It’s fascinating stuff.

(NB YOUR PARAMETERS OF “FASCINATING” MAY VARY.)

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