Wings Over Scotland

Contrary to what might sometimes seem to be the case, we don’t much like attacking the Scottish media, particularly the self-styled “quality” end of the market. Any good democracy needs a free press to function, and with newspaper sales in freefall the economic model for proper investigative and analytical journalism faces the biggest challenge in its history. We criticise the press not because we want to destroy it, but because we want it to live, and more importantly to be worthy of that life.

There is much to cherish in the pages of the Herald and the Scotsman, even if some of it (including but not limited to Iain Macwhirter and Ian Bell in the Herald, and Ewan Crawford and George Kerevan in the Scotsman) is used to provide a figleaf of balance behind which the papers can hide their bias. But it’s impossible for the publications in question to credibly protest that bias in the light of weeks like the past one, when the Scottish and UK press has united around a campaign of what cannot be reasonably described as anything other than concerted, co-ordinated lying.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re hoping to get a spot of Christmas shopping done today, assuming that we can un-freeze our front door, so here’s a few bits and bobs worth reading while we’re out.

Some sage advice for the First Minister from Iain Macwhirter

A sane analysis of the EU situation from Dr Daniel Kenealy

An informative but admirably concise assessment of the UK economy by Terry Smith

The baffling mystery of how City Parking manages to lose vast fortunes in Glasgow

Tavish Scott offers his view of independence campaign funding

Back soon, apocalypse permitting.

If there’s one thing we all ought to grudgingly respect about the No campaign, it’s its ability to get all its ducks in a row and pump out an absolutely united and consistent lie. It’s a lot like a World War 1 artillery barrage – impressive in the sheer co-ordinated brute force of its display, even if it’s in fact completely useless in achieving its desired objective and ultimately leads only to a slaughter of its own troops.

Jose Manuel Barroso must be marvelling at it today. Time after time after time he’s quite unmistakeably said “I am NOT referring to Scotland, I’m talking in generalities”, only for the British media to report it, with a single unified voice, as the EC President making clear and specific proclamations directly about Scotland.

Read the rest of this entry →

Perhaps the paper was confused after watching yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show, on which the host asked the question (at 37m) “Are you in favour of a squeeze on welfare?”, to which the allegedly-Labour politician Mr Balls replied “Of course!”

(Balls subsequently tried to waffle his way out of the response by claiming that he’d reduce the welfare bill by creating jobs, but Marr had expressly asked whether he backed the specific cuts to in-work benefits in the current welfare reform bill, and despite his repeating the question several times Balls refused to give an answer.)

Read the rest of this entry →

Analysis later. If you simply want to read the two passages of the Leveson Inquiry’s report which concern the actions of the First Minister without wading through 2000 or so pages, you’ll find them below. Bored readers may wish to compare the contents with our own assessment/predictions from five months ago. (NOTE: Where it says “emphasis added”, the emphasis in question was added by Lord Leveson, not by us.)

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scottish media is winding itself up for another sustained assault on the Scottish Government. Kerry Gill of the Scottish Daily Express has been pushing the story hard since last night along with some journalists from other English papers, and the BBC’s Scotland correspondent James Cook set the scene in a tweet this morning:

Sure enough, the Scotsman carried it as a front-page lead below only the Leveson Inquiry report – while inflating the figure by over £31,000 for effect – and the Herald also carries a prominent piece, although at least only rounding the amount up by £1,420.

The reports reveal that 36 people spent around a week in the US, taking part in various business events in addition to attending the golf tournament, which the Scottish Government was contractually obliged to send a delegation to as part of the agreement to host it at Gleneagles in 2014, and which is predicted to be worth £100 million to the Scottish economy. But as the papers line up to hand the Holyrood opposition a club to hit the First Minister with over the spending, there’s a very significant part of the equation missing from the coverage.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Guardian carries a rather provocative piece today, suggesting that the SNP and the other nationalist parties at Westminster might do a deal with the Tories to push through their controversial proposals on changing (or gerrymandering, as some would have it) the UK’s constituency boundaries, in return for a radical overhaul of the Scottish constitution which would hand an unprecedented package of powers just short of full independence to the Holyrood parliament.

The plans are generally presumed to be electorally advantageous to the Conservatives, who currently have to secure considerably more votes to form a majority than Labour do, and the Lib Dems have vowed not to back their coalition partners on the issue after House Of Lords reform was shelved, leaving the Tories in need of votes from the smaller opposition parties to have any chance of getting the legislation through.

We’ll put aside for a moment the unworthy notion that if the Lib Dems are vowing to oppose the changes then that almost certainly means they’ll end up voting for them, and concentrate instead on the broader plausibility of the story, which appears to be sourced solely from a single former Tory MEP. Would the SNP really enter such a Faustian pact with the Tories for the sake of devo max? Let’s delve into the detail.

Read the rest of this entry →

Good piece about Parliamentary standards today by Iain Macwhirter over on his personal blog. It covers a lot of ground, and we’re not 100% sure we go along with the comments on Nadine Dorries, but this passage (our emphasis) leapt out:

“And by the way, the PO should ban the practice of applauding at question time. Holyrood has turned into a bear-pit. It isn’t anyone’s fault in particular – though Labour’s conduct has been pretty inexcusable. You can’t win any argument by ranting – except in a pub. The Nats have been behaving in a heavy handed manner since they won their landslide majority and their packing of parliamentary committees hasn’t helped.

Labour’s frustration is partly down to their being locked out of all influence. But it was their fault they lost the election by such a crushing majority, and they aren’t helping their chances of re-election by restoring to the politics of closing time.”

We’ve said several times before that applause should be banned from all forms of televised political debate except at the start and end. It swallows up precious time and serves no purpose – all sides of any given debate will (or at least should) be represented in the audience, and will obediently clap their own man or woman, telling us nothing. It wasn’t permitted in the 2010 UK general election leaders’ debates, and so far as we can tell it wasn’t missed. Holyrood should be no different.

But it’s the second paragraph quoted above that’s even more on-the-nose. In much the same way that they didn’t ever seem to genuinely accept the fact that they lost the 2007 election – seeing it instead as a blip, a grudgingly-permitted technicality, that the SNP got more seats than them – Labour in Scotland have absolutely refused to acknowledge the much bigger hiding they took four years later.

Johann Lamont constantly demands an input that her party simply didn’t earn – the electorate chose, entirely democratically and after looking at the conduct of the previous administration and opposition, to give the SNP the power to run the country without any petty, obstructionist interference this time round. Labour are going to have to suck that up for another three-and-a-half years at least, and if they don’t get a grip on themselves pretty soon they’re going to burst a blood vessel.

Crybaby Nation is a land without borders. But a couple of recent news items from it do have a particularly Scottish flavour. One of them, also reported in the Daily Record, concerned an expat Scot and Motherwell supporter in the US banned from having “MWELLFC” on his car licence plate, on the barely-believable grounds that someone might interpret it as “ME WELL F**KED” and be offended. The other one, though, shames us more, because it happened on our own patch.

According to STV News, two new Grampian Fire & Rescue Service vehicles have had to be taken in and repainted after two people complained that the Saltire on their front grilles was a “political symbol”, connected to the SNP and independence movement.

We’re not even going to insult you by pointing out what pathetic, cringing, snivelling creatures those making a complaint against their own country’s flag must be, or how irrational the argument is. We’re just going to slump face-down onto our desk and sob for a couple of minutes about the gutless “corporate team” who allegedly decided to back down over it. We’ll be with you again shortly.

There’s a very good piece in the Scottish Sun today by Andrew Nicoll – entitled “Why promise more devolution when it will never happen?” – on the consequences of a “No” vote in the 2014 referendum. It’s well worth reading in full, but if you’re in a rush we’ll just quote the last line of it to give you the flavour:

“Independence has been a gun at Westminster’s head for decades. What do you think will happen when they find out there are no bullets in it?”

We are, as ever, pleased to see the mainstream Scottish media catching up with the stuff we’ve been saying for months, although the reality is in fact even worse than Nicoll suggests. Nonetheless, it’s good to see the analysis disseminated in Scotland’s biggest-selling paper, and by a proper senior staff journalist rather than the cop-out option of an opinion columnist. The Scottish Sun has almost ten times the circulation of the Scotsman, the country’s supposed “quality” broadsheet, and it’s worth remembering that pieces like this will therefore reach far more people than the likes of Michael Kelly, Brian Wilson or Magnus Gardham could ever dream of. Slowly but surely, the independence campaign is winning the argument, and the opposition’s panicked response tells the story. Stay out of the mud, folks.

Do you think the Scotsman is concerned that readers might miss the latest front-page attack piece on the Scottish media’s November target-of-the-month Mike Russell?

(Note that this isn’t just multiple links to the same page, the clever trick that the paper pulled last Friday in relation to essentially the same incident – this is the same story repeated word-for-word on two separate pages, as you can see by the fact that one has three comments while the other has 59 comments. It’ll be interesting to see which one gets pulled if and when they correct the error – our money’s on the one with 59.)

[EDIT 12.05pm: Sure enough, the 59-comment version of the page has now vanished, leaving only the three-comment version.]

We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, which examined whether oil revenues were enough to sustain future Scottish public spending. Remarkably, it even interviewed Professor Gavin McCrone, and highlighted the fact that his infamous report was suppressed by the Westminster government for 30 years. And yet bizarrely – but as always seems to be the case – the programme insisted on analysing the economy of a future devolved Scotland, not an independent one.

That, however, is a startlingly stupid thing to do. Let’s keep this simple.

Read the rest of this entry →