Wings Over Scotland

Well, that was exciting. The entire English-speaking world of videogames journalism just about convulsed itself into a coma yesterday because someone did that rarest of things in the English-speaking world of videogames journalism – spoke openly, frankly and truthfully about something. If you've been having trouble keeping up with the dizzying pace of developments, allow us to lead you gently through the most concise and accurate timeline we can manage.

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Below is the originally-published version of an article entitled "A Table Of Doritos", which appeared on Eurogamer this week, before being censored by the site following a complaint from Lauren Wainwright, who was mentioned in the piece. Lauren Wainwright is a journalist whose entry on Journalisted includes Tomb Raider publisher Square-Enix in the roster of her "current" employers.

WoSland republishes the article here, without the permission or knowledge of either Eurogamer or the article's author Robert Florence, in the interests of news reporting. It is unedited save for the fact that we've highlighted in bold the passage that Eurogamer removed. If it's libellous, as Lauren Wainwright claims, we invite her to sue us.

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“Bruised Salmond denies lying as rows engulf SNP” (Magnus Gardham, the Herald):

“Ministers, who have always insisted membership would be automatic and that Scotland would not have to join the euro single currency, refused to say. In July, Scotland’s Information Commissioner, Rosemary Agnew, ordered them to reveal whether any advice existed.

The Court of Session was due to rule on the Government’s appeal but yesterday Ms Sturgeon admitted ministers had “not sought specific legal advice”. She said there was “now no need” for the Government to continue its appeal, which to date has cost £12,000 of taxpayers’ money.”

“Salmond’s darkest day in government” (Herald View, also in today’s Herald):

“For months the Nationalists have attempted to close down debate on the issue by insisting it was done and dusted. Unexpectedly yesterday, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon revealed no specific legal advice had been sought.

If this is the case, taxpayers are entitled to know why the Government has spent £100,000 of public funds going to the Court of Session in an attempt to prevent the publication of whether or not such advice had been sought.”

Our emphasis in both cases. Crikey, that must have been an expensive taxi ride.

(We did, of course, post a comment asking which of the figures was correct. The Herald has so far declined to publish it for some unknown reason.)

It’s not like we didn’t already know that, of course. But while Labour desperately distort and edit Alex Salmond’s words to try to justify an allegation of untruth, ably assisted by the Scottish media doing the same to Nicola Sturgeon by cutting her microphone when she attempted to answer questions on the subject, their Scottish leader – sorry, “deputy” leader – quietly gets on with doing what he does best: telling outright, unambiguous, empirical lies.

We’ll let the veteran Scottish journalist George Kerevan (a former Scotsman editor, Labour councillor and SNP candidate), who did all the hard work of digging out the stats, tell you all about it. But here’s a quote from the piece just for flavour.

“Following the publication of the latest official employment figures on 17 October, Anas Sarwar announced to the BBC: “In the last three months, 7,000 people in Scotland have lost their jobs while employment in the rest of the UK is going up – this SNP government has to start taking responsibility for that”.

Mr Sarwar is factually wrong.

The figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) do not say that 7,000 people “have lost their jobs” in the period June through August (i.e. the summer).

It is true that the figure for the total jobless rose by 7,000 to 222,000. But most of that 7,000 figure has nothing to do with people losing their jobs, as Mr Sarwar claims. Rather, it is due to young people joining the labour market from school of university, which is normal in the summer. And from people previously not looking for work returning to the labour market – usually a positive sign of returning economic confidence.

The ONS figures actually show that the fall in the number of jobs in the Scottish economy of the summer was only 1,000. Certainly that is going in the wrong direction. But it does not help policy analysis to misquote the true figures, or exaggerate actual job losses by a factor of seven.”

We look forward keenly to the media reporting Mr Sarwar’s lie, and grilling him on Newsnight Scotland about it while muting his replies.

We’re going to be pretty brief on this one, because it’s literally a story about nothing. The Scottish Government has just revealed, after a long back-and-forth battle over a Freedom Of Information request, that it hasn’t sought the advice of law officers over an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

Expect much fuss in the Scottish press tomorrow, although the SNP cunningly releasing the advice on the same day as the resignation of two MSPs will give editors and frothing columnists a headache over which to concentrate on. (There’s also the small matter of the referendum consultation results being published.)

But where’s the meat here? We genuinely don’t get it.

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The Herald, 25th January 2012 (“SNP ‘will not use new-found wealth for campaign'”):

“The cash-rich SNP will resist the temptation to flaunt its new-found wealth by raising the limits for campaign spending in the referendum, The Herald understands.

The consultation document being laid out by Alex Salmond today is expected to say that the main campaign on each side should be limited to spending £750,000 – as set out in a consultation paper on a draft referendum Bill two years ago.

There will be a similar section in today’s consultation paper and the SNP’s opponents were looking to cast a keen eye on it, given that the Nationalists have received two huge donations in recent months.

If today’s paper had raised spending limits, opponents could have been expected to cry foul. However, The Herald understands the Government is not planning to go down that road”

The Herald, 22nd October 2012 (“SNP threatens to defy watchdog on vote spend”):

“SNP ministers have been accused of trying to rig the independence referendum by imposing tough spending limits on the pro-UK parties. The SNP Government has proposed the two main campaign organisations, Yes Scotland and Better Together, should be allowed to spend no more than £750,000 in the crucial last 16 weeks of the campaign.

Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Margaret Curran, said: “It didn’t last even a week before the SNP decided to move the goal posts.

“No Government has ever gone against the Electoral Commission’s recommendations and if the SNP doesn’t accept its decision on spending limits in the referendum, then it will be an insult to Scottish democracy.””

Hang on a minute, our heads are spinning.

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It’s hard to level accusations of bias based on nothing but tone, so let’s stick to the facts. Most of last night’s edition of Question Time on BBC1 discussed general political matters rather than the independence debate (overlooking the fact that one informs the other, of course), but there was a hefty section explicitly on the subject.

At the time of writing you can still watch the show for yourself on the iPlayer, but to save you sitting around with a stopwatch here’s how it broke down.

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“There is a widespread assumption that the SNP has been outmanoeuvred by David Cameron in agreeing to a single question on independence” – the Independent, 15 Oct

Good work, Dave. Keep it up.

From the BBC’s “at a glance guide to the referendum agreement” feature, written by the Corporation’s political reporter Andrew Black:

What the agreement actually says, if you bother to read it properly:

(Severin Carrell of the Guardian made the same mistake, incidentally. We’ve let Mr Black know, and we’ll watch with interest to see if the BBC corrects its error as quickly as Mr Carrell did when we pointed it out to him. EDIT: the article has now been fixed, but with no acknowledgement of the fact and with the “last edited” timestamp at the top of the page not changed. Naughty, BBC.)

We don’t want to be too obnoxious about it – heaven knows we can all get a bit mixed-up now and again amid the heat and chaos of battle – but the matter of who conducts the referendum seems to us to be a fairly important one to get right first time. You know where to come if you want things reported accurately, readers.

We’ve noted before that it’s both naive and unreasonable to expect the BBC to be impartial with regard to Scottish independence. The Corporation has a direct vested interest in the status quo, partly financial and partly self-preservation. It’s important, when watching BBC Scotland in particular, to keep in mind that independence will mean the journalists, producers etc in question losing their jobs and careers.

(They would, of course, in theory be able to join any replacement state broadcaster, but it’s fair to say that many of them have already burned their bridges in that respect.)

If you think that’s a little paranoid, have a listen to these two short interviews by (we think) Auntie Beeb’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith, which are currently being looped on the BBC website in the absence of any developments in the meeting between Alex Salmond and David Cameron.

Interview with Michael Moore

Interview with Nicola Sturgeon

Does the tone and content of the questioning strike you as fair and balanced? Or does one interviewee get, let’s say, a rather more sympathetic and less confrontational hearing than the other? We wouldn’t like to say. You call it.

There’s an intriguing story in the Sunday Times today, which quotes the Conservative former Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth describing the Prime Minister as “Pontius Pilate” and granting the First Minister “a walkover” in respect of the negotiations over the independence referendum, which are apparently to be finally concluded with the signing of an agreement in Edinburgh tomorrow.

We;ve attached the full story below so you can have a wee keek through the Times’ paywall and read it for yourself. But we can’t help wondering: if the PM is Pontius Pilate in this analogy, then who is Alex Salmond?

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The latest circulation figures for newspapers in Scotland are out, and frankly there’s little point in analysing them in any great detail as the results are pretty much identical to the last time we did it. That is, everything except the i is going down the toilet, the Scottish Sun is continuing to pull further and further ahead of the Daily Record, and its new Sunday edition is breathing ever-closer down the neck of the Record’s sister paper the Sunday Mail, which shed almost a quarter of its readers in the last year.

As with the previous figures, most publications have seen 12-month drops in the range of 10%-25%, what you might broadly term “right-wing” papers have held up slightly better than more left-wing ones, and several have monthly readership figures lower than the monthly number of unique visitors to this humble website.

We’ll pause only to wonder whether there might be some sort of a connection between the generally-worse performance of the left-wing papers and the fact that the parties they support are increasingly abandoning the traditional left-wing values of their readers (while the Sun, which backs the most left-wing major party in Scotland, is doing rather better despite the supposed “toxicity” of its owner), and leave it at that.