Wings Over Scotland

Here’s Ken Macintosh MSP (Labour) on today’s Good Morning Scotland:

GARY ROBERTSON: Do you have concerns about where the funding for the Better Together campaign is coming from? There have been questions about a half-a-million donation from Ian Taylor and his background. Do you have concerns about that as someone who’s part of that campaign?

KEN MACINTOSH: I don’t… I have to say I’m not close enough to the campaign to know. I’ll go have a look at this story afterwards, but I…

GR: It’s been around for a couple of days now. Basically there are question marks about this man’s background and his business dealings in the past. Questions that have been raised at Westminster by Douglas Alexander for instance.

KM: Well, I certainly would want the Better Together campaign to make sure that the people donating to the campaign are abiding by all the laws and are properly scrutinized by it. But no inside knowledge. I’m not close enough to the campaign to be able to tell you that.

It’s a fair comment from the Labour finance spokesman.

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It seems odd to talk of the anti-independence campaign being “desperate” when most polls still give them a significant lead. But to any rational observer the tone of the debate has changed noticeably since the turn of 2013, culminating in the extraordinary and hysterical outburst on the “Better Together” website this week [local copy] when challenged on what we’ll call the “colourful past” of its chief donor Ian Taylor, lest we get any more badly-spelled letters from his lawyers.

(This humble wee website has seen a quite dramatic increase in malicious targeting of various kinds in recent weeks, from legal threats to disgusting personal smearing from No activists and various forms of “cyber warfare”.)

And when you see what the Scotsman’s been reduced to making one of its lead stories this morning, the weight of evidence for the growing state of panic in the No camp becomes hard to ignore.

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This is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall looking comfortable and confident on last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight as the recently-controversial subject of campaign donations was discussed.

Not for the first time, his comments seemed a little at odds with the truth.

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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.

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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.

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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:

“The largest cheque, for £500,000, came from Ian Taylor, a Scots oil trader with a major stake in the Harris Tweed industry, after a meeting on Lewis with Alistair Darling, the Better Together leader and former Labour Chancellor.

Although most of the large donors are registered to vote in Scotland, Taylor is not, prompting calls from the Yes camp for donations in excess of £500 to be restricted to those actually voting in the referendum.”

And then there’s this, from the Herald back in January:

“It is ‘nauseating’ that rich political donors like Sir Sean Connery should be allowed to support the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) campaign for independence, a Labour MP claimed today.

Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) said only those who lived within Scotland and paid their taxes should be allowed to donate towards the campaign for independence ahead of the referendum next year.”

(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.

England:

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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?

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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.

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