Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday, we discovered a rather curious anti-independence “listicle” on the popular viral-meme website Buzzfeed. Entitled “Scotland. The UK. 10 Myths. 10 Facts.”, it describes itself as “myth busting” by an author identified only as “YouDecide2014”.

It was shared or retweeted by a variety of Conservative Party special advisers, the 10 Downing Street Facebook account, and even the UK Ministry of Defence.

The crude, extremely biased article gives no indication that it’s written by the UK government. The closest it comes to doing so is right at the end, where it says “Get the facts at www.gov.uk/scottishreferendum“. The Buzzfeed account page makes no reference to the UK government, and the layout makes the piece look like any normal article on the site, although in fact it’s posted on Buzzfeed Community, which is an area where users can post anything they want to without censorship.

We decided to find out more.

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I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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One of the great things about this site’s sky-high viewing figures is that on the rare occasions when we might be, for example, out having a walk in the park to get over the crushing disappointment of somehow losing yet another Scottish Cup semi-final, our ever-vigilant readers will remain alert.

Otherwise, we might have missed this.

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The other (and more complete) view of this story from yesterday:

Remember, readers, when we were all over the papers as “creepy as f**k”, intimidatory “spies” for peacefully and non-confrontationally documenting alleged “Better Together” events with long-distance photos in which we carefully avoided publishing anything that could be used to identify any individuals?

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Earlier today we highlighted two pieces of disgraceful, mendacious smearing by The Scotsman, in conjunction with an “anonymous” Labour MP. The articles coincided with a wider campaign of demonisation across most of the Scottish and UK media against supporters of independence, backed up by elected Labour representatives on social media in what might easily be seen as a co-ordinated attack.

The tweets above are from the account of semi-literate Labour councillor for East Kilbride, James Docherty. They follow a week in which the Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray described the placing of one or more small “Yes 2014” stickers on his constituency office windows as an “out of control” escalation of intimidation and Alistair Darling accused some people objecting to a businessman sending a document full of scaremongering lies to 500 employees of his company as “shaming Scotland”.

These hysterical smears would be laughable were it not for the consequences they may yet bring about. We highlight some of those consequences below.

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As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.

It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.

As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.

And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.

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Well, this is the month of the Mad March Hare, we suppose.

First we had Bernard Ponsonby telling us that the referendum was a choice between independence and a completely imaginary “more powers” option. Next up was Hamish Macdonell in the Spectator, oddly hallucinating that David Cameron had announced “devo max” when in fact he’d announced devo nothing at all.

At the weekend (and, we suspect, all this week) there were journalists insisting that Johann Lamont was offering Scots major advances devolution when in fact she was essentially offering the 2009 Calman Commission with a new ribbon tied on it.

But the winner is surely David Torrance in today’s Herald.

“This was the first Scottish Conservative gathering I can remember in quite a while where there were visible signs of political life. Ms Davidson made the best conference speech of her leadership, actually connecting with her audience, while usefully the venue, Edinburgh’s shiny EICC, didn’t conform to type by being dusty and half-empty.”

Our emphasis. But, um…

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So we’re just letting this one slide, are we?

“[David Mundell], who next year will mark 10 years as the only Tory MP in Scotland, says, if there is a Yes vote, the First Minister’s declaration of Independence Day will have no legal status and be merely an aspiration.”

The Edinburgh Agreement seems increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.

We already know that Scottish Labour consider any government of Scotland that isn’t themselves to be a “dictatorship”. So in context this comment from South Scotland list MSP Graeme Pearson in the Holyrood chamber yesterday is actually quite restrained:

“The Police Service is insufficiently accountable and it needs to be subject to proper governance, because if it is not properly governed, there is a danger that it will become merely an army of occupation that is maintained at public expense.”

It’s no accident that Labour so regularly call the democratically-elected SNP “fascists” and compare Alex Salmond to a whole cornucopia of murderous genocidal dictators. But we suppose that regarding the Nats as an invading foreign army, deploying Police Scotland as occupying troops, makes a bit more sense of both Labour’s dogged defence of the UK, and their oft-expressed distaste for foreigners.

We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.

Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.

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So we just got this a few minutes ago (click pic to enlarge):

And now we’re really starting to think a licence-fee avoidance campaign is a good idea.

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