Wings Over Scotland

It’s not even a fortnight since we started to document the increasing levels of bullying, intimidation and dirty tricks employed by the No campaign against the far more numerous grassroots activists of Yes Scotland. We must admit, we weren’t expecting it to descend to outright physical violence quite this soon.

The picture above is taken from a story in yesterday’s Edinburgh Evening News. It shows an 80-year-old man, James McMillan (no relation to the differently-spelled composer James MacMillan CBE, who recently referred to pro-independence artists’ group National Collective as “Mussolini’s cheerleaders”), who was hospitalised with a broken wrist and other injuries after being attacked in the street by a woman outraged by his Yes placard.

It was only a matter of time.

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STV this morning reports a speech to be given today by Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, in which she issues some blood-curdling warnings about the chaotic impact of independence on Scottish trade with the UK.

There are a couple of things Ms Davidson should probably know.

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This site has on several occasions praised the Daily Record for its sustained – and almost alone in the UK media – campaigning against the callous savagery of “Work Capability Assessments” carried out for the Department of Work and Pensions by the ironically-named Atos Healthcare, though we’ve also pointed out the Record’s curious reluctance to mention how Atos came to be in that position.

Today, though, mere economy with the truth has evolved into all-out lying.

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Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.

But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.

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This site spends much of its time highlighting major outbreaks of misrepresentation, spin, distortion and outright lying in the Scottish and UK media. Readers will be aware that we very rarely find ourselves short of material.

Which means that we don’t often have time to report the small stuff.

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We were struck by a curious vision when watching Thursday’s edition of Scotland Tonight. The show bizarrely chose to focus its attention on the manufactured outrage about Elliot Bulmer’s article for the Herald, with the alleged serious criminal offence which led to the “revelation” reduced to a minor incidental footnote.

And we found ourselves wondering what would have happened if the producers had gotten their scripts mixed up, and treated the other big news story of the day – the conviction of MSP Bill Walker for a string of domestic assaults on family members between 1967 and 1995 – the way it handled the Yes Scotland hacking story.

We think it might have gone a bit like this.

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We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.

We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.

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We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.

And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.

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We might have to transcribe the whole thing, because it’s remarkable.

But for now here’s just a brief flavour of Willie Rennie on the subject of an independent Scotland’s membership of NATO, from last night’s Newsnight Scotland (from 5m 30s).

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Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.

The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.

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David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:

“Next year is the centenary of the start of the Great War and some nationalists in Scotland think Mr Cameron is pulling a Salmond. Coming as it does in August between Bannockburn and the referendum vote, they believe the commemoration has been planned as an artificial booster to Britishness. ‘There’s no conceivable justification or precedent in British history’, complained a Reverend Stuart Campbell, ‘for celebrating the start of a war.’

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If you hate listening to audio or watching video (as opposed to reading the printed word) as much as we do, or if you’re just at work and can’t, here’s a complete transcript – courtesy of one of our splendid readers – of this morning’s BBC Breakfast appearance from UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.

Once again, the very last line of the transcript is the killer.

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