Wings Over Scotland

Things must be grim at Project Fear HQ if things have gotten this desperate and amateurish 15 months out. The latest speculative FearBomb is that “mobile phone companies could introduce roaming charges when people cross over the border.”

(Coupled, rather excellently, with the assertion that “Scottish independence could also drive up the cost of posting letters”, apparently under the impression that we’ve all forgotten the price of a stamp in the UK rocketing by a eye-watering 39% last year.)

We all love our mobile phones, so that would be an excellent piece of scarework – if only it was more than a fortnight since the EU announced that roaming charges are to be abolished in Europe by July 2014, two months before the independence referendum and almost two years before Scotland would actually be independent.

Come on, guys, it’s like you’re not even trying any more.

We might have to make this a regular mirror strand to “Quoted for truth”. We’re struggling to get our heads round a particularly dim-witted piece in today’s Scotsman by Gregor Gall, a left-wing academic who the paper notes is “professor of industrial relations at the University of Bradford and lives in Edinburgh”. (Tough commute.)

It’s full of all manner of illogical cobblers (we have a feeling that we saw The Illogical Cobblers supporting Birdland at the Edinburgh Venue in about 1989, but that’s another story), from which one passage really leaps out with its underpants on its head.

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A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.

(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)

A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.

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We almost feel sorry for the UKIP candidate for Aberdeen Donside, poor Otto Inglis. All day today he’s been pictured on news bulletins standing silently like a spare object at a wedding while broadcasters interviewed his party’s leader Nigel Farage instead.

Then again, after the brutal shoeing Mr Farage took from STV’s Bernard Ponsonby this evening, perhaps Mr Inglis will be feeling he got the best end of the deal.

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As our Twitter followers will know, we’ve experimentally decided to reserve Saturdays for light-hearted comic banter, as a bit of relief from the serious business of politics.

Of course, this week politics has been so absurd – from “Better Together” deciding it was Better Apart to Gordon Brown promising Scots that if they vote No he’d increase their taxes and send the money to England, and the still-ongoing Faragemageddon – that it hardly seems necessary, but we’ll stick with the plan.

With that in mind, then, it’s time for… British Loony Of The Week!

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Yesterday we were reading an engrossing article by Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov. It’s only available in PDF form as far as we can tell, and in terms of formatting it’s a bit of a trial to get through, but the information within is fascinating.

It’s a study of the difficulties faced by Labour in their attempt to win the 2015 election, and without wanting to spoil it for you, Kellner’s conclusion is that it’s going to be extremely difficult. That won’t be news to Wings Over Scotland readers, of course, but the depth of detail is well worth getting into if you’ve a head for that sort of thing.

We gleaned something different from the piece, though.

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This is a thing that really happened this afternoon:

It’s hard to know where to begin. It seems pointless to even try. An unelected trough-swilling convicted violent drunken criminal just used the rape of a child as a weapon against independence. More dignified things lurk slithering in sewers.

Over time, and particularly since the turn of 2013, this site’s attitude to the Unionist media in Scotland (which is to say, ALL of the media in Scotland) has undergone something of a shift. Previously we held its partisan spin and naked dishonesty in professional contempt, but more recently it’s become increasingly hard not to simply feel sorry for the poor beleaguered hacks on dying publications as they wrestle uncomprehendingly with their bleak future.

To exercise something as poisonous and destructive as hatred or even anger over today’s lead in Scotland on Sunday by Tom Peterkin (cache link), for example, would be about as productive as entering into a debate on a Saturday night with a drunk who was urinating into a skip and simultaneously ranting about immigrants round the back of a Lidl car park. All we can really do is sigh, call social services and walk sadly on.

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A couple of paragraphs in a Vince Cable story (to over-dignify the piece in question) from today’s Scotsman are quite amusing if you swap the order they come in.

“The first day I took up my job as the chief economist at Shell I was given a plaque which had an Arabic saying and when I pressed for a translation, they said ‘All those who claim to predict the future are lying, even if they are later proved right’.”

Righto.

“Business Secretary Vince Cable last night warned that an independent Scotland’s reliance on revenue from oil would result in savage public spending cuts or tax rises, as he addressed the Liberal Democrat Scottish conference.”

Oops!

(Title to be read in the style of the famous football chant.)

Independence supporters have a slight tendency to exaggerate the (nevertheless real) bias of the BBC. We couldn’t face watching Newsnight Scotland last night, but on catching up via the iPlayer this morning it was far less objectionable than many reports on Twitter had led us to believe.

What we’re a bit more concerned by is the Corporation’s growing rank incompetence.

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We were oddly pleased to discover yesterday that the full iPad edition of the Daily Record is free five days a week. Partly because, regardless of content, reading the actual paper (albeit on a screen) is a much more evocative wee reminder of home than a generic website, and partly because the Record’s online presence carries only a fraction of the stories of the print version.

One such print-only item is today’s small piece – in fairness quite prominent at the top of Page 2 – about last week’s vote of a large Scottish branch of the CWU (the trade union which represents postal workers) in which the branch decided by a huge majority to campaign for a Yes vote in the independence referendum.

Oddly, the vote has attracted far less media attention than the “mock referendum” held at Glasgow University recently, which got near-blanket TV and news coverage. We’re sure the different outcome has nothing to do with that whatsoever.

But in all the reporting and discussion of the Glasgow Uni vote, we’re pretty sure we don’t recall Blair Jenkins or Nicola Sturgeon responding to the result by saying “Well, they’re just a bunch of stupid know-nothing kids, so screw them”.

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(And finally… #24)

A charming shot of a British nationalist from an EDL march in Manchester today.

You might need to click the pic to get the joke.