Wings Over Scotland

Oddly, despite much trailing of it before publication, we haven’t seen any major coverage of Alex Salmond’s lengthy interview with the New Statesman last week in the media. We kept forgetting to go to the shop for a copy, but today we downloaded the magazine’s iPad app, which contains the full interview among its free content.

That being the case, we’re comfortable with reprinting it for the purposes of discussion. We’ve tidied the formatting up for ease of reading – the NS’s sub-editor/style guide compiler needs shooting, frankly – and added our own commentary (in red) where appropriate. A few quibbles aside, it’s a fascinating and quoteable piece. Have a read.

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A new voice in the referendum debate – ladies and gents, Professor John Curtice!

Thank goodness. We hadn’t seen him on TV in hours, we thought he’d died.

Each bright new day brings a fresh game of Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline here at WingsLand Towers, but we were a bit thrown by this morning’s front page.

“Economists say indyref could drive investors away” is pure Magnus, but that four-word qualifier tacked on the end is a bit out of character. What could be going on?

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Today’s editorial leader in Scotland on Sunday is really interesting, from a language nerd’s perspective (ie very much on our turf). Entitled “A warning to No campaign”, the column – nominally on the subject of pensions under devolution – purports to criticise said group, noting that “the Better Together campaign, by repeatedly presenting the idea of change as a threat, is doing Scotland no favours.”

But lurking just barely below the surface is an entirely different agenda.

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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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Scotland on Sunday, 17 June 2013:

“[Johann Lamont] can be awful on telly. One recent encounter, in which she was asked repeatedly whether or not she favoured keeping Trident, has been transcribed on a politics blog and makes grim reading – a masterclass in prevarication, hesitation and the making of fudge.”

It’s nice to know those horrible hours of painstaking effort pay off sometimes.

Here’s the Labour diehard, former Lord Provost of Glasgow and regular Scotsman columnist, Michael Kelly, on last night’s concluding episode of “Road To Referendum”:

As befitting a tribal dinosaur of the old Scottish political school, Kelly popped up to proffer a vintage line that’s fallen out of favour with the No campaign, namely that Scotland is too wee and too poor to go it alone. But it was something else he said in the same segment that caught our ear.

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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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Last night’s extended edition of Newsnight Scotland was a special “no men allowed” independence debate. Unlike last week’s Question Time, the BBC at least offered a panel comprising equal representation from both sides, and one of the panellists was Amanda Harvie, introduced as a business consultant and former chief executive of a financial-services industry body, Scottish Financial Enterprise.

Ms Harvie claimed (around 42m into the programme) that she wasn’t an official ‘Better Together’ representative, “nor do I speak for a political party – I’m a businesswoman”. But an alert reader noticed that she looked a lot like another Amanda Harvie.

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That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:

The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.

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Looks like we’ve got another difference of opinion, Geoffrey.

“The late Brian Adam, whose untimely death has prompted the by-election, won with just under 56 per cent of the vote two years ago with nearly two votes to Labour’s one.

But a lot has changed since Adam’s glory night. Then, a popular and charismatic SNP, which had pragmatically negotiated four years of minority rule at Holyrood, was rewarded with an epic victory across Scotland. Now, facing pressure over its preparations for independence, and carrying the burden of a monopoly on power, it is a very different world.

Alex Salmond’s stratospheric popularity ratings of two summers ago have dipped back to earth. Labour is, once again, snapping at the SNP’s heels.”

That’s the Scotland On Sunday view (in an article which appears to be littered with several troublingly major factual errors, such as claiming the Aberdeen bypass is “still in the courts” when it isn’t, and asserting that numerous very real and operational institutions haven’t been built yet when they rather visibly have).

But the Sunday Herald is getting quite different vibes from its people on the ground.

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Because they can’t both be.

“Scotland sees rise in number of race hate cases“

(Headline in today’s Scotsman.)

“Overall, however, there was a decrease in both racist and religiously aggravated offending in Scotland”

(Actual text of the same article.)

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