First of all, congratulations to the Herald for only being eight days behind a retired website on this story. Unusually fast work, lads.
Now let’s deal with the spin.
A few days have now passed since Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement of the supposed routemap to an independence referendum, and we’ve had time to analyse it properly.
You’re not going to like it much.
Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.
The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.
This is getting properly embarrassing.
Because that starting gun must be red-hot by now.
As we’re a polling site now, a brief post on polls.
In a column for today’s Herald on Sunday, Iain Macwhirter repeats the frequently-made assertion that “Boris Johnson is loathed in Scotland and is the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher”.
The first part is certainly true, as it has been of pretty much every Tory Prime Minister of the last 40 years. But the second part simply isn’t borne out by the facts.
Above (click to enlarge) is the graph of Yes polling since Johnson became PM. It shows support for independence FALLING from 52% to 49% during his term in office.
If you discount the Lord Ashcroft poll from a few days after he entered Downing Street (because Ashcroft isn’t a British Polling Council member), the graph becomes Nicola Sturgeon’s political speciality – a flat line, from 49% to 49%.
Johnson has “recruited” nobody. Those are the cold hard facts.
We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.
So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.
Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.
Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.
It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.
The SNP collected slightly over 1 million list votes in Thursday’s election, which nevertheless elected just two list MSPs because SNP voters care about power for the SNP rather than about independence, and chose to let dozens of Unionist MSPs get seats rather than other pro-indy parties.
But the bigger tragedy is that one of those two was Emma Roddick.
It really is deeply dispiriting the see the level of utter burning contempt in which Nicola Sturgeon holds the independence movement, if this is the sort of ludicrously insulting garbage she thinks it’ll swallow.
Who told us it’s garbage? Nicola Sturgeon did.
At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.
Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.
So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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