Wings Over Scotland

…on whether 16/17-year-olds are smart enough to vote. Here’s one of Scotland’s bright young things on last night’s Question Time, talking about independence:

“Do you [Angus Robertson] not think the SNP are mucking us about right now? Because we’re not even getting answers on will we have free tuition… how are we going to know that our education’s going to be as good as it is right now?”

Yikes.

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We’re struggling to think of a reason why the SNP’s Angus Robertson (and to a slightly lesser extent journalist Lesley Riddoch) would still want to turn up for tonight’s Question Time in Edinburgh. Up against four anti-independence panellists, Robertson can’t expect to achieve much other than looking embattled and defensive – he can surely hope for little protection from David Dimbleby in the chair.

Riddoch has already tweeted about the show’s imbalanced line-up. If our memory serves us correctly, she’s a firm advocate of the policy of male speakers refusing to appear on heavily gender-imbalanced panels (which tonight’s QT also is), so why not politically-skewed ones too?

It seems to this site that principled withdrawal is by far the better option.

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We were going to do something on the disgraceful line-up of tonight’s edition of Question Time, broadcasting from Edinburgh with an audience of 16/17-year-olds, but frankly we couldn’t put it any better than the Scottish Green Party’s official complaint to the Corporation has. You can read it in full here.

UKIP have no Westminster MPs, no Holyrood MSPs and no Welsh AMs, and attract a microscopic proportion of the vote in Scottish elections, yet their leader Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time (14) than any other politician since 2009. The Greens have representation in both Westminster and Holyrood, but the Scottish party has been invited onto QT just once in the same period.

The show’s guest list tonight will uphold the BBC’s standard debate policy of four anti-independence politicians (Farage plus George Galloway, Anas Sarwar and Ruth Davidson) against a single pro-independence one (the SNP’s Angus Robertson) with a token neutral (Scotsman journalist Lesley Riddoch). Enjoy. We’ll be playing poker.

Did something really dramatic just happen without anyone noticing? Yesterday we passingly noted a curious new trend in the Scottish media: that of Unionist papers complaining that the problem with independence is that it isn’t independent enough.

But it wasn’t until we went back and had a closer look at yesterday’s Daily Record that the full strangeness of the picture became clear.

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The Scottish press has reacted in a fairly typical manner to the release yesterday of a Scottish Government-commissioned report on the implications of independence on welfare, which is to say by finding the most doom-laden interpretation of it possible.

Leading the charge is the Daily Record, with a piece that online goes by the relatively restrained headline “Undoing hated Con-Dem cuts could could put all benefit payments at risk, SNP are warned” (though the print version screams “SNP TOLD YOU CAN’T CUT TORY CUTS”). The Scotsman follows along with “SNP welfare plan ‘a risk’”.

Both, though, are telling a deeply – and obviously – misleading story.

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Wordplay! Because not only is this article a token attempt at having a post on WoSland for the first time since nineteen-banana, it's about putting something on the empty shelves of the infinitely annoying Newsstand app in iOS.

I've been delving around the App Store newsagents, and after a world of pain found a bunch of totally free publications (no time-limited trials or any of that guff) that aren't completely awful, and will stop you having to look at that ugly, undeleteable, unhideable icon. You can see them in the pic above. Links/descriptions below.

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We know we’ve gone on about this subject quite a bit. But in all fairness to Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, she’s hardly trying to conceal the constitutional reality of a post-No-vote Scotland if the Tories have anything to do with it.

What continues to mystify us, though, is why every single mainstream-media journalist keeps inaccurately reporting that the “line in the sand” leader has become a miraculous convert to the idea of devolving more power to Holyrood, when Davidson herself keeps making it absolutely clear what she’s really talking about.

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As veteran readers will know, there’s little this site enjoys more than investigating the Comical Ali-style claims made by the No campaign about the attendance figures at its events, which it typically likes to exaggerate by between 100% and 150%.

Disturbingly, though, the contagion which robs victims of basic counting powers seems to be infectious, and taking hold even beyond the bounds of “Better Together”.

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Readers will probably barely recall a story from back in January, because it only made the front page of almost every Scottish newspaper and the lead item on most Scottish political TV and radio programmes. It was a Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report which put support for independence – via an extremely old and outdated question formulation – at a dramatic low of 23%.

Almost as forgotten was the “Better Together” campaign’s half-hearted attempt at capitalising on the numbers, by misrepresenting them as meaning something else entirely in order to create a misleading graph. (Perhaps because by now we’re so used to them being somewhat creative with numbers that nobody noticed.)

So it’s only to be expected that the latest poll numbers from the same source, released yesterday, don’t seem to have made any of today’s papers or broadcasts.

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We had a wee fond chuckle to ourselves this morning when we woke up at some ridiculously ungodly hour and saw the front page of the Scotsman.

Not, you understand, at the thought of millions of Scottish people getting cancer, and certainly not at the Duke of Edinburgh being admitted to hospital, but rather at the staunchly-Unionist paper inexplicably missing a chance to add the words “after independence” or “under SNP” to the headline, as would be its more common practice.

But then we read the actual article.

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Along with more direct, overt scaremongering, it’s probably fair to say that the core theme of the “Better Together” anti-independence campaign to date has been “uncertainty”. Day after day sees the media and public assailed with neurotic demands for definitive answers about every conceivable aspect of an independent Scotland that in most cases couldn’t be answered by any nation on Earth, including the UK.

The No camp disastrously overplayed its hand with the “500 questions” fiasco, which saw it subjected to literally worldwide mockery, but it suffered an arguably even more wounding blow today with the release of some figures which blew gaping holes into pretty much everything it’s spent the last 18 months saying.

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