Wings Over Scotland

Much of the Scottish media today is full of (mostly right-wing) commentators bleating piteously about the dreadful carnage in Edinburgh yesterday in which, um, a couple of dozen scruffy student types shouted at a silly man for a bit. Here, for example, is the usually-sane Alex Massie wringing his hands about the horror of it all in the Spectator:

“The hounding of Farage is a reminder that Scotland  – or at least Scottish politics – is not quite as generous, open-minded and tolerant a place as it likes to fancy itself. There is, it seems, a narrow spectrum of views deemed acceptable or legitimate. Anyone who falls outside that range can be ignored or, better still, suppressed.”

Suppressed? Are we talking about the same Nigel Farage?

THAT Nigel Farage, up there?

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…does this page appear in today’s edition of the SCOTTISH Sun?

Anyone got a copy to hand? We could find out, but we’d rather not hand over the 69p.

We should point out in advance that we’re using the word “voter” quite wrongly here. But a piece in today’s Daily Record has us beaten all ends up for wrongness.

The article’s headline, “Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri: I wouldn’t vote for Scottish Independence”, is entirely accurate – the 1980s pop star lives in London and won’t be voting in the referendum. Her reasoning, though, is a touch unexpected.

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When we’ve been asked on a couple of different occasions why we started Wings Over Scotland, we’ve always given the same reply – to ask (and thereby try to answer) the questions that the Scottish media was dismally failing to ask on our behalf. It would be hard to illustrate that failure with a better example than what happened yesterday.

We’re not even talking about the bog-standard factory-default Unionist bias that’s seen not a single newspaper today depicting the launch of “United With Labour” as a “split” in the anti-independence movement – after a year of leaping on every single policy difference or minor spat between members of the Yes campaign as evidence of “chaos” and “turmoil” – despite the news/comedy value of an organisation devoted to “unity” and “togetherness” breaking into splinter groups just months into its existence.

We refer to something much more fundamental – basic journalistic competence.

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Sir Alex Ferguson (no relation) resigned as manager of Manchester United this week. The resulting deluge of newspaper articles covered a wide range of opinions, both gushingly complimentary and rather less so, but one characteristic of the man was uniformly (and approvingly) agreed on – that he always defended his players.

And it was hard not to contrast that unwavering loyalty (a trait described by Ferguson himself as “the anchor of my life”) with events in the independence debate last week.

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Somewhat to our surprise, the tabloid press at least hasn’t been able to avoid covering Labour activist, election candidate and BBC pundit Ian Smart’s astonishing brainfail outburst of Sunday night. (We’ve just noticed a Herald piece too, leaving – surprise! – the BBC and Scotsman as the only media not to consider it worthy of note.)

[EDIT 7pm: Scotsman now belatedly also covering.]

Smart himself has attempted a hasty damage limitation exercise, claiming that his comments, which presented Scotland as a nation of violent racist bigots suppressed from attacking minorities only by (relative) economic stability, were in fact directed solely at a small faction of independence-supporting “cybernats”.

But that isn’t true.

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Let’s imagine for a second, just for a bit of fun, that this was a prominent SNP or Yes Scotland activist, rather than a Labour one who’s the main contributor to LabourHame and regularly employed by the BBC for some cosy chat on the Sunday Politics.

Charles Green wasn’t using the P-word in a hateful or prejudiced way either, but he got slammed all over the media, chased out of his job and fined £2500. We’re guessing it’s a non-story here, though. Shall we all have a look at the papers tomorrow and find out?

But incredibly, the P-word isn’t even the most offensive thing.

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The Scottish press has chosen its latest martyr well. Perhaps aware that the average politician – whose day job is basically one long playground name-calling session – doesn’t tend to cut a very convincing figure as the subject of “bullying”, this week the print and broadcast media chose someone a little more sympathetic to portray as a broken, pitiful victim of the Evil Cybernat Hordes: a poor vulnerable wee lassie.

A tiny 4’11”, Susan Calman is nevertheless a former lawyer (who’s worked on Death Row in the USA) as well as a comedian, and one might reasonably expect that she’d be fairly used to both being asked for evidence and being heckled. It’s quite difficult to imagine that any time she was challenged in a courtroom, with someone’s life hanging in the balance, she crumbled in tears at the shock of anybody requesting that she support her case with some sort of verifiable facts.

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We don’t really want to spend all day discussing things from a single rapidly-declining minority-interest Unionist newspaper, but we spent 69p this morning buying a copy of the Scotsman in order to check some facts on the Susan Calman story, so we’re going to flipping well get our money’s worth.

The paper runs a rather odd piece today, in which the Labour-linked Centre for Public Policy for Regions is called upon to analyse a single Yes Scotland press release relating to the Scottish economy. (A boxout at the end promises a similar treatment for a “Better Together” leaflet at an unspecified point in the future.)

We’ve screenshotted the entire piece here if you want to read it without giving the Scotsman any traffic. But just to give you the flavour of the overarching (or underlying, depending on how you like to look at it) tone, below we’ve stripped out everything except the CPPR’s considered professional assessment.

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The “Calmangate” story just keeps getting stranger and stranger. A few hours after our piece earlier today noting that the Scotsman had overwritten their article alleging the comedian had suffered death threats and a “barrage of abuse” with a completely new one, a version of the original reappeared at its original address.

Its temporary absence was (ostensibly) explained by a post in the comments:

“Required for legal reasons”? Hmm, let’s see.

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We weren’t exactly shocked to see the Scotsman still trying to flog the “evil cybernats” routine this morning with another story about Susan Calman, with the paper seizing on some comments from Fiona Hyslop as their excuse to keep the issue alive.

Today’s article, though, is noticeably more restrained than yesterday’s. It’s liberally sprinkled with disclaimers and caveats noting that the threats and abuse had been alleged, rather than reporting them as empirical facts. It even notes that Ms Calman has declined to comment further on the supposed events, implying that there were questions to be answered.

Then we got to the comments, and things started to get a bit weird.

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Several weeks on, we still await answers from the No camp to several serious questions about their biggest donor, Ian Taylor of Vitol. But the ongoing furore (we’re really not sure issuing the Herald with a legal threat worked out the way Mr Taylor hoped it would) over his £500,000 donation has kept attention away from the other substantial contributors to the “Better Together” campaign fund.

Aberdeen local paper the Evening Express has decided to put that right, though.

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