Wings Over Scotland

Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen had a quite extraordinary meltdown on Twitter last night and this morning after we highlighted an appalling article that she’d written for Saturday’s paper.

After angrily attacking other users for a few hours, by the end she’d declared a full-on DefCon One, sending out a desperate plea for hauners from entities as diverse as the Times, the New York Times, the Telegraph, the NUJ, the Washington Post, Guardian Scotland, BBC Radio 4, the Drudge Report, the CEO of Twitter and JK Rowling.

At the time of writing, none had replied.

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Supporters of Scottish independence have known for years that the civic “nationalism” espoused by the Yes movement bears no relation to the so-called “blood and soil” varieties found in many other countries. Every racist or ethnic-nationalist organisation in Britain – the BNP, the EDL/SDL, the National Front and so on – was stridently No.

But a YouGov poll released today puts numbers on it for the first time.

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In your media today:

Oh, right. One of THOSE days.

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Fear and lies work. Over many decades (and really for centuries) the Unionist parties and the media have succeeded in persuading a large percentage of Scots that they’re beggars, scroungers, vagrants and “subsidy junkies” dependent on the ever-generous charity of England to keep them from starvation.

And in terms of the facts, that hasn’t always been an easy sell.

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Then:

And how about now?

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We originally wrote this article in March, in response to the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (better known as GERS) figures for 2014-15. We’ve updated it to take account of events since that time, of which there’s been one rather major one.

Today saw the publication (just five months after the 2014-15 GERS) of the 2015-16 stats, which are again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media, as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures – showing an essentially unchanged “deficit” despite an almost £2bn fall in oil revenue – destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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“CRISIS-HIT POLICE TO AXE 300 OFFICERS”, blares the front-page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail. (Along with some exciting Prince Harry not-news.)

“SECRET cuts to police numbers will see hundreds of officers axed as the single force faces a deepening cash crisis. The Mail can reveal controversial proposals to reduce frontline manpower – while violent and sex crimes are increasing”, it continues.

So let’s see what this worrying-sounding story actually DOES reveal.

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The BBC’s most prominent politics presenter Andrew Neil, today:

There is, as there is so often, just one small problem.

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Today’s Sunday Times didn’t bother with any subtlety in its signalling of how people should expect the Scottish media to handle next week’s GERS figures.

So we’ll just leave these here:

The limitations of GERS

The five key facts about GERS

The wishful believers

Gazing into the black hole

There’ll be nothing but repeats of all last year’s articles in the papers, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in re-writing all the rebuttals. We’d advise readers not to expect to hear any of the facts or arguments in any of the above articles aired on TV or radio discussions of the new figures either. For the sake of your blood pressure, it’s probably best to stick to old QI repeats on Dave for the next eight days.

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For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.

The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.

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No, we’re not referring to the Spectator’s awful reheated whine from super-Unionist composer Sir James Macmillan, Knight Commander Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire, in which he takes the audacious step of accusing some OTHER artistes of cravenly kowtowing to the establishment.

(A complaint he’s been levelling for several years in any publication that’ll listen, and which today’s piece hasn’t bothered to update with any post-2014 examples.)

We’re actually talking about this:

Because this one’s even older.

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There’s a story in today’s Herald about yet another SNP disaster:

Backfires? What, the fares have gone UP?

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