Wings Over Scotland

The Sunday Mail, 19 May 2013:

“Labour are meant to be convincing Scots that we can trust them with our future. On this evidence, you would not trust them to go to the garage for chocolate.”

The Observer, 19 May 2013:

“The Scots are accustomed to having their views ignored in the British political system. Despite voting consistently for the left, Scotland has been governed by Labour for only 30 years out of 68. If England is set to elect the Conservatives, in other words, it’s hardly worth going out to vote in Scotland at all: we know what we’ll get.”

And today in QFT we’ve got three for the price of one.

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This week’s Scotland on Sunday is full of the usual outpourings of fear and madness (our absolute favourite is a standout piece of howling-at-the-moon insanity from frothing Tory loonbag Gerald Warner, magnificently entitled “Feminism driving holocaust of abortion”), but one in particular caught our eye.

Headed “Independent Scotland at risk from bank crash“, the Tom Peterkin effort (based, in fairness, on an imminent UK government document) kicks straight off with an opening line that’s a top-shelf example of hysterical sub-Daily-Mail scaremongering. But it’s the second line that makes it special.

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Thanks to the alert reader who pointed us at a Plymouth Herald story today about lovable UKIP candidate and teacher of British children, the charming Ron Northcott.

“Plymouth UKIP man quits after calling Scots ‘workshy addicts’ in Twitter rant

A UKIP politician has “fallen on his sword”, after abusing Scots people on the social media site Twitter. Ron Northcott, a former election candidate in Plymouth for the UK Independence Party, resigned from the party yesterday. David Salmon, UKIP’s Plymouth chairman, said:

“Ron is not talking to any member of the press. I can say that following the appalling behaviour of some Scots against Nigel Farage, Ron was involved in what he describes as banter with a Scot living in London.

His out-of-character remark was unacceptable and he has stood down with immediate effect as a potential candidate for next years elections. We in no way condone his language and the sentiments expressed. He has stepped down and will be leaving UKIP.”

Northcott’s “banter” came to light because this site highlighted it and posted it on Twitter, where at the time of writing it had been seen by over 8,000 people. You can read the now-deleted badinage below.

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As our Twitter followers will know, we’ve experimentally decided to reserve Saturdays for light-hearted comic banter, as a bit of relief from the serious business of politics.

Of course, this week politics has been so absurd – from “Better Together” deciding it was Better Apart to Gordon Brown promising Scots that if they vote No he’d increase their taxes and send the money to England, and the still-ongoing Faragemageddon – that it hardly seems necessary, but we’ll stick with the plan.

With that in mind, then, it’s time for… British Loony Of The Week!

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Much of the Scottish media today is full of (mostly right-wing) commentators bleating piteously about the dreadful carnage in Edinburgh yesterday in which, um, a couple of dozen scruffy student types shouted at a silly man for a bit. Here, for example, is the usually-sane Alex Massie wringing his hands about the horror of it all in the Spectator:

“The hounding of Farage is a reminder that Scotland  – or at least Scottish politics – is not quite as generous, open-minded and tolerant a place as it likes to fancy itself. There is, it seems, a narrow spectrum of views deemed acceptable or legitimate. Anyone who falls outside that range can be ignored or, better still, suppressed.”

Suppressed? Are we talking about the same Nigel Farage?

THAT Nigel Farage, up there?

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Never let it be said we don’t do balanced reporting.

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We’re indebted to the alert reader who sent us a link to this last night:

If you don’t have time to sit through it all now, it’s an STV referendum debate – not about independence in 2014, but about devolution in 1997. In short, all the arguments and dire warnings we’re fed by Unionists now about independence were also deployed against devolution, which doesn’t in fact seem to have caused the sky to fall in.

It’s also interesting to note a BBC news story uncovered by National Collective this morning which reports a poll finding that “76% of businesses believe a double-yes vote in Thursday’s referendum would harm the climate for business in Scotland”.

While right-wing, conservative organisations like the CBI and FSB will doubtless never stop bleating about the terrible “uncertainty” of constitutional change, it’s good to see that there’s been at least some progress made in that field.

The Guardian today reports the incredibly depressing news that “Labour voters [are] increasingly turning against the poor”, with growing numbers of the party’s supporters now blaming the victims of recession and austerity for their own plight.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the anti-poverty Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is quoted in the piece saying “The stark findings of this report highlight the increasingly tough stance people are taking against people in poverty. We appear to be tough on those experiencing poverty, but not tough on its causes.”

How can such a horrific, callous scenario, with the supposed party of the downtrodden and voiceless abandoning those who need the most support, ever have come to pass?

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When we’ve been asked on a couple of different occasions why we started Wings Over Scotland, we’ve always given the same reply – to ask (and thereby try to answer) the questions that the Scottish media was dismally failing to ask on our behalf. It would be hard to illustrate that failure with a better example than what happened yesterday.

We’re not even talking about the bog-standard factory-default Unionist bias that’s seen not a single newspaper today depicting the launch of “United With Labour” as a “split” in the anti-independence movement – after a year of leaping on every single policy difference or minor spat between members of the Yes campaign as evidence of “chaos” and “turmoil” – despite the news/comedy value of an organisation devoted to “unity” and “togetherness” breaking into splinter groups just months into its existence.

We refer to something much more fundamental – basic journalistic competence.

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Sorry this post is a bit late, folks. We’ve been pretty stymied all morning trying to get a handle on the extraordinary, unmockable mendacity that’s being fed to the people of Scotland as we speak, which keeps crashing our powers of rational comprehension.

We quite often highlight the utterances of The Labour Party in Scotland (henceforth TLPiS) as examples of “blackwhite”, the Orwellian term for presenting the truth as the exact opposite of reality. But today must surely have set some sort of world record.

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Yesterday we were reading an engrossing article by Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov. It’s only available in PDF form as far as we can tell, and in terms of formatting it’s a bit of a trial to get through, but the information within is fascinating.

It’s a study of the difficulties faced by Labour in their attempt to win the 2015 election, and without wanting to spoil it for you, Kellner’s conclusion is that it’s going to be extremely difficult. That won’t be news to Wings Over Scotland readers, of course, but the depth of detail is well worth getting into if you’ve a head for that sort of thing.

We gleaned something different from the piece, though.

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