There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.
But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.
We’ve noted a few times in the past that one of the challenges of highlighting media bias is that you rarely get a chance to directly compare like with like. If a Labour MP is caught up in some sort of scandal and the media soft-pedal it, say, it’s all very well claiming “It’d be different if this was someone in the SNP”, but unless the latter does the exact same thing it’s hard to make it stick.
So this week presents a rare opportunity to study the phenomenon in the flesh, as both the Yes and No campaigns release their lists of campaign contributions so far. Let’s see how it went.
The short version is, we don’t know either.
As of around half an hour ago, the National Collective website looks like this:
The site had recently attracted a great deal of traffic for a post entitled “Dirty Money: The Tory Millionaire Bankrolling Better Together”, which compiled together links to a number of newspaper articles about Ian Taylor, a businessman who donated £500,000 to the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign.
The story was picked up today by the Herald and Daily Record, with the latter’s piece including the line “Vitol said allegations made about them this week were inaccurate and they were taking legal advice”. [EDIT 4.15pm: The Guardian now reports that “the Herald has now had a lawyer’s letter and so too has National Collective”.]
(Possibly coincidentally, the site’s Wikipedia entry has been nominated for deletion.)
As far as we can establish, the stories linked in “Dirty Money” – in, among others, the Guardian, Mirror and Telegraph – are still online. There’s an absurd, huffy, pious whinge on the “Better Together” website complaining with no apparent irony about the article being part of “a co-ordinated dirty-tricks campaign by the nationalists”.
Other than that, we’re as much in the dark as everyone else.
The Daily Record, 5th May 2010:
“Before Margaret Thatcher, Scotland made steel, ships, cars and trucks and produced coal. By the time she had finished with our country, all those industries were devastated – and tens of thousands of proud men and their families were living in ravaged communities with no jobs and no hope.
Scotland could wake up tomorrow to the grim reality of a new Tory government, led by Thatcher disciple David Cameron. And for all his talk of “compassion”, few doubt that we will suffer again if he wins power. We spoke to five men who lost their livelihoods under the Tories, and they all had the same message for the voters: “Don’t let them loose on Scotland again.”“
Well, voting Labour didn’t work. What else could we try?
This is from last weekend’s Sunday Herald:
And then there’s this, from the Herald back in January:
(All emphases ours.) Mr Taylor lives in London – not located in Scotland the last time we checked – and is Chief Executive of an oil-trading company called Vitol, whose extremely colourful history includes the fact that “Last year, it was revealed that for a decade the company had been using Employee Benefit Trusts which avoided tax on incomes of its UK staff and was in discussion with HMRC about a deal to pay this off.”
(The next-biggest donator, author CJ Sansom, sent their £161,000 cheque from their home in Sussex, which we’re fairly sure also isn’t in Scotland.)
We’ve dropped Mr Sheridan a line asking if he finds non-Scottish-resident, tax-avoiding Ian Taylor’s huge donation to the No campaign “nauseating”. We’ll let you know his answer the minute it arrives, which surely won’t be long.
And we’re not going to hypocritically pretend that we are.
Glorying in the death of an individual is unseemly, especially one long past the time when they did their damage. Owen Jones put it well here. Today, though, with no shame whatsoever, we celebrate the death of an icon. Not the human being, but the values they stood for and their appalling toxic legacy of what was once a country one could be proud of being a part of.
That country died in 1979, and its corpse was dug up and desecrated in 1997. Nothing we could say, no matter how awful, would be a tenth as despicable as the changes wrought in Britain over those last 34 years. So we’re going to say nothing, and play a song with words that are impossible to make out. You might prefer some others.
Below is a Daily Record story about lots of people giving money to “Better Together” (although confusingly, apparently it’s for an “election” rather than a referendum), accompanied by a large picture of handsome “Trainspotting” star Kevin McKidd.
One might infer, not unreasonably, from the headline and picture that Mr McKidd was one of the No campaign’s “big-hitters”. There’s nothing at all in the article’s text which would dissuade readers from that view.
But hang on – do they mean THIS Kevin McKidd?
So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?
After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.
On the 12th May 1916, a man born 48 years previously in Edinburgh’s Cowgate was strapped to a chair in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin and – after receiving the last rites – was shot by a firing squad. He was too weak to stand.
In 2002 a BBC poll for its presentation of the “100 Greatest Britons” had him in 64th place. Yet he is hardly known in Scotland. Virtually the only time his name impinges on public consciousness is when those who wish to honour his name by public march in Edinburgh have to be given police protection from violent Unionist bigots.
The Telegraph deserves some credit today. It runs a heartbreaking story about the reality of life on benefits, of the sort both the Conservative and Labour parties want to be “tough” on. It’s a piece of gripping, truthful and hard-hitting journalism, highly and properly critical of the party the paper steadfastly supports. Hats off to the author.
Then you read the comments.
This site often reflects on the absence of real political choice available to the UK electorate, but it has rarely been more clearly illustrated than it was on this morning’s BBC breakfast news in an interview with Labour’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls.
Interviewed by presenter Charlie Stayt, Balls first clarified Labour’s position on the top-rate tax cut taking effect this week. Refusing to commit Labour to restoring the 50p rate if elected in 2015, Balls nevertheless made the meaningless pledge that if an election were to be held tomorrow it would be in Labour’s manifesto.
(An interesting distinction from “We would actually do it”, of course.)
We’re a bit puzzled by this. Either a 50p tax rate brings in more money or it doesn’t (and it does – even George Osborne’s own budget statement noted that it raised an extra £1bn for the Treasury compared to the 40p rate that preceded it), so what does it matter what the country’s general economic condition is? Shouldn’t Labour be committed as a matter of principle to wealth redistribution by taxing the rich?
Instead, Balls said that reducing the rate to 45p was “not my priority” (rather than, say, “I think it’s wrong”), suggesting that it was nevertheless something he’d want to do. But it was on welfare reform that he was most revealing.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
