Wings Over Scotland

Alex Salmond’s appearance on Scotland Tonight this week raised an issue we’ve been meaning to address for a while, so let’s do it now before we forget again.

Of the numerous polls of the last few months, the most encouraging for supporters of independence was the one conducted by Panelbase for the Sunday Times in late October. It showed a pretty tight race at 37% Yes to 45% No, but the most interesting aspect was how the numbers changed when voters were asked for their opinion in the hypothetical scenario that they expected the Conservatives be returned as either a majority or coalition government at the 2015 Westminster general election.

In that scenario, independence leapt ahead with a massive 10% swing, to lead by 52% to 40%. But much less reported by the media was another finding of the poll.

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In a Twitter conversation yesterday, we suggested that a solution to the problem of biased reporting in the Scottish media might be to adopt a variant of the “Whizzer and Chips” approach. That is, you’d have two newspapers in one – one way round the news would be presented from a Unionist perspective (as it is now), but if you flipped the paper over and read it from the other end it’d have all the same stories, except covered by independence-friendly journalists.

It looks like the Guardian has tentatively taken the idea up already.

Scottish Government proposals for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £1,250,000
NO side: £1,500,000
(advantage of £250,000 to NO campaign)

Electoral Commission recommendations for regulated referendum spending limits:

YES side: £2,994,000
NO side: £2,931,000
(advantage of £63,000 to YES campaign)

Oh no! It’s another defeat for the SNP!

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And as we’re talking about money, we couldn’t resist this one.

“Pro-independence parties will be able to spend £1.494m compared with £1.4m for the pro-UK parties, an advantage of £63,000.”

Keep up the good work, chaps.

We don’t look at British political cartoons very much, mainly because we can’t think of a consistently good one. It seems to be a lost art since the long-gone days of Angus Og, devoted less to cutting insightful and acutely-observed satirical commentary than to the altogether baser pursuit of grotesque caricature.

Even the Guardian’s much-vaunted Steve Bell leaves us stone-cold 99% of the time, and often desperately scouring the news pages to work out what the joke is supposed to be about, let alone whether it’s funny. (He’s been drawing David Cameron with a condom on his head for a fair few years now, and we still have no idea why.)

But half-awake this morning, we clicked on a link in a tweet that led us to The Scotsman’s latest effort, and it’s a sort of masterpiece, in much the same sense that while murder is a terrible thing, Harold Shipman was undeniably really good at it.

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It’s commonplace for professional journalists these days to dismiss bloggers and social-media users as “internet bampots” – frothing, furious, abusive lunatics ranting at parked cars. But in fairness, some do tend to get a bit over-excited from time to time.

By way of example, let’s check out a couple of the wilder-eyed nationalists who’ve been allowed out by the nurses to air their rage in public this week.

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We know for certain that a good many Scottish newspaper and broadcast journalists read this website, so maybe one of them will enlighten us about something. The latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey report contained a wealth of tables and statistics in respect of the independence debate, but the entire media seized, with complete and startling uniformity, on one in particular.

It was a curious choice to highlight, as it related to a vaguely-worded, ambiguous question with no relevance to the options which voters will actually choose between in the referendum. Yet the very same survey contained a much more interesting set of results which got either a dismissive passing mention or no coverage at all.

Since, as we’ve already established, there’s no Grand Unionist Black-Ops Society which meets in Pacific Quay to decide how best to serve the grim needs of the No campaign, we’d honestly like to know how not one single newspaper, TV channel or radio station thought this particular question merited lead status in their coverage of the SSAS. Because it presents a radically different picture of Scottish opinion to the one absolutely everyone decided, by miraculous coincidence, to paint.

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It’s a real bonus for us when other people dissect something so comprehensively, from a variety of angles, that we don’t have to bother. The solitary piece of what could conceivably be described as solid content in Ruth Davidson’s speech in Edinburgh yesterday appeared to comprise a well-known football chant, which we’ll paraphrase for sensitive readers: “We’re [not of a very high standard], and we know we are”.

Fortunately, we’ve been saved some time in pulling it apart in detail thanks to three excellent and forensic examinations by the unlikely trinity of Lallands Peat Worrier, Alex Massie in the Spectator  and – heavens above – Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph.  We’re off now to check our temperature and make sure we don’t have a fever.

As we’ve noted before, media bias is a subtle beast. It doesn’t (we think) take the form of dastardly late-night meetings where BBC or Scotsman editors gather to plot the next day’s subversion of the Yes campaign. Much of it comprises things journalists often aren’t even consciously aware they’re doing, as documented by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their remarkable book “Manufacturing Consent”.

(We’ve appended a footnote below this piece by Douglas Daniel, summarising a few of the book’s core principles as they can be applied to the independence debate.)

Let’s be uncharacteristically charitable, then, and assume honest intentions when we examine an interesting piece by Magnus Gardham in the Herald today, which goes by the headline “PM’s Euro gamble has strengthened SNP’s hand”.

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We’ve pilfered the files of the tremendous Scottish Political Archive before (you’ll have seen one here, for example), but in the light of today’s earlier post and a comment on it from an alert reader directing us to this fantastic piece about the 1979 No campaign, we’ve been rummaging around in there again. We particularly enjoyed this image (click to enlarge) and its contents, from a campaign group called “Scotland Is British”.

There’s pure gold in almost every line (we particularly enjoyed the description of independence as “ultimate separation” in section 4, and how everything predicted as a dire consequence of devolution in section 3 happened anyway without it), but the most familiar of the many top-drawer zingers was in section 6.

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We owe SNP communications officer Erik Geddes an indirect hat-tip for this one, as a link he posted to something else on Twitter led us to discover this superb piece from the Herald archives. It’s from the 28th of February 1979, the day before the first referendum on Scottish devolution – the one which resulted in a Yes vote, but which was rejected on the grounds of a rigged amendment by a Scottish Labour MP, delaying the return of a Scottish parliament for 20 years.

It’s absolutely startling to read the “No” responses and see just how indistinguishable most of the dire warnings about the consequences of an “Assembly” are from the arguments against independence we hear now, and to also note how few of them (in fact, none) came true when devolution finally arrived.

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Earlier today we had a wee pop at the Herald for the headline of this story:

The reason for our complaint was what we felt to be the misrepresentation of a poll asking a multiple-choice question about the Scottish constitution:

“What clearly WOULDN’T be fair, though, would be to present those statistics as a drop in the “Yes vote”, because the SSAS’s multiple-optioned findings on an obsolete 14-year-old form of a “constitutional preference” poll bear no relation whatsoever to any “Yes/No” question that’ll be asked in 2014.”

So it was a nice surprise to later, by sheer chance while browsing around for nothing in particular, happen across the same story with a slightly different tone. Evidently the paper had listened to reasonable, fair criticism and taken admirably prompt action.

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