Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour mouthpiece the Daily Record is currently running a long series of horror stories about Atos “Healthcare” and their appalling persecution of the sick and disabled. We heartily and sincerely commend the Record for doing so, even if it usually fails to note that Atos were unleashed on the poor and vulnerable by a Labour government, and occasionally just outright lies about it.

You might expect, then, that the valid concerns of the Record and its readers would be earnestly reflected by the nation’s Labour MSPs when the Scottish Parliament debated the issue of Atos’ conduct of Work Capability Assessments yesterday.

You’d be wrong, of course.

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As you might expect, attendance at yesterday’s independence rally in Edinburgh has been the subject of much spin and counter-spin. The police, who have of course never knowingly overestimated the size of a march for any cause, put the crowd at 5000, a figure which the Unionist press has repeated as fact. The marchers themselves seem fairly united around an equally-predictably higher claim of 10,000.

Out at the extremes, a few exciteable nationalists somehow got it into their heads that the capacity of the Ross Bandstand auditorium was a frankly ambitious 12,500 while poor old mad Ian Smart of Labour suggested there were fewer people at the rally than St Mirren took to their game at Rugby Park, ie under 1000.

(Though he subsequently conceded that it might just have been as many as 2000, albeit while also asserting that we should expect significant SNP resignations in the next 48 hours as a result of something or other connected to the event.)

This excellent shot taken from Edinburgh Castle and sent to us by WingsLand reader Jean T should provide some sort of guide as to whose estimate is closer to the mark.

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Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.

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From “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell, published in 1949:

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

From the Daily Record, 20 September 2012:

“Iain Duncan Smith promises more disabled benefits cuts in Scotland: the Work and Pensions Secretary was the man behind bringing in Atos, who have been criticised for humiliating fit-for-work tests.”

Atos Healthcare was first employed to conduct Work Capability Assessments on claimants of Incapacity Benefit (and other disability benefits) in October 2008, under the Labour government of Gordon Brown, when said Labour government introduced Employment Support Allowance in order to reduce the welfare bill by replacing the previous benefits with one that was, for most recipients, around a third lower.

A 2009 report by the Citizens Advice Bureau highlighted Atos’ tendency to find people unexpectedly fit for work, but Brown’s government took no action against the company.

Iain Duncan Smith has merely continued Labour policy, using the same company hired by Labour to carry it out. The Daily Record is attempting to nakedly rewrite history to excuse Labour from responsibility for a measure which hurts a great many Record readers. Unfortunately for the Record, people are watching.

Alert readers will have noticed that we gave up on maintaining our Scottish media appearance log a while back. With pressures of work and a shortage of help, it was just too much to keep up with by ourselves, requiring hours of monitoring every day even just for the “big three” of Good Morning Scotland, Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland, let alone shows like Call Kaye or anything on commercial radio.

However, we did continue to record appearances for quite a while after our last report, so it seemed remiss not to at least compile the stats to that point, which covered the first five months of 2012. The figures for January 1st to May 31st are as noted below.

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As we’ve previously noted, it’s always nice to know that the mainstream media in both Scotland and the UK is keeping an eye on our humble little site. We noticed some strangely familiar statistics popping up in Graham Spiers’ piece on Craig Levein in yesterday’s Sunday Herald, for example.

But today we’re pleased to see the press picking up on a facet of the latest sample of Scottish opinion in a Social Attitudes Survey which we raised during the last one, way back in December 2011 – namely the Scottish electorate’s bizarre confusion over the meaning of independence.

Most of today’s papers report the headline finding of 32% support for a Yes vote in the 2014 referendum, but this time around they’ve also managed to point out the thing we observed last year: if you rephrase the question, asking voters if they think Holyrood rather than Westminster should control every aspect of Scottish government – in other words, that Scotland should be independent – the proportion in favour leaps dramatically upwards. In this case, it shoots by more than a third to 43%, more than twice the number (21%) who support the status quo and considerably more than those in favour of so-called “devo-max” (29%).

With the two surveys producing near-identical results, the only rational conclusion it’s possible to draw is that the i-word itself is the problem. The people of Scotland, it turns out, actually DO want independence more than any other constitutional arrangement, so long as you don’t actually call it that. As the survey itself notes with pleasing understatement, “Evidently there is something of a puzzle to be unravelled here.”

Meanwhile, we have a tip for news and cutting-edge-analysis fans: if you want to see what’s going to be in the Scottish press tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, just keep reading Wings Over Scotland and then wait a while.

We need to come up with a name for this sort of thing. The weekend saw a prime example of the cynical, dishonest negativity that’s been inherent in the “Better Together” campaign since day one (and indeed, long before it was named as such).

Two stories about things being banned appeared in Sunday’s papers – the ejection of the “Scottish Republican Socialist Movement” from participation in this month’s march and rally for independence in Edinburgh, and the BBC’s successful complaint against “Better Together” for using its logo in a campaign leaflet. The former got more prominence, as the headline story in Scotland on Sunday in which Labour’s Jim Murphy used the incident as an excuse to smear the SNP despite not a shred of evidence being offered to suggest that the party even knew of the existence of the SRSM (which as far as we can gather is three blokes in a shed), let alone that it was comfortable with its cartoonishly extremist stance.

The anti-independence campaign, meanwhile, declined to offer an apology to the BBC for the illegal use of its logo, and instead took the opportunity to proudly announce that it would be reprinting 100,000 copies of an amended version of the offending leaflet, apparently in response to the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine pointing out the misdeed.

Readers of this site will of course be entirely familiar with this modus operandi, by which random and often anonymous internet nutters who happen to support independence (even if they in fact belong to entirely different parties) are treated as SNP spokesmen acting with the backing of, and speaking for, the SNP leadership. Yet on the Union side even official named representatives – often elected MPs and MSPs, who are paid by the public to represent all their constituents, including those who want independence – are never held accountable for their words and actions.

(Johann Lamont, for example, is yet to publicly reprimand a single one of the numerous Labour MPs and MSPs who have compared Alex Salmond to genocidal murderers, despite Labour regularly forming shrieking lynch mobs demanding the resignation of all and sundry if some minor council-election candidate from the SNP says something mildly contentious on his private Facebook page.)

We haven’t thought of a snappy name for this dismal phenomenon of deliberate double standards yet. It’d save a lot of trouble if we could just refer to it by a category name and avoid having to explain it every time, because we’d put good money on it continuing to happen for the next two years. Anyone got any ideas?

Way back at the start of this year, we remarked on an odd comment by Michael Moore, the Secretary of State for Scotland, in which he said that the UK government would not mount a legal challenge if the Scottish Government pressed ahead with conducting an independence referendum on its own terms without a Section 30 order from Westminster. It’s an assertion Mr Moore has repeated today in the Sunday Mail:

“I am not interested in the UK Government challenging this. It wouldn’t be for the UK Government to do it, it would be for others.”

We’re going to repeat what we said in January – it would be absolutely extraordinary if the British Government stood idly by and watched an illegal attempt to break up the United Kingdom, so why is Moore saying they won’t? And what does that reveal about the UK administration’s true opinion on the legality of the referendum?

As we noted yesterday, Michael Moore has pretty much nothing to do all day. The Scottish Office has no significant responsibilities, but if there was one thing you’d think WAS within its field of authority it’d be if the Scottish Government acted outwith its competence with regard to the UK Government, which he tells us is exactly what it’d be doing if it conducted an “unauthorised” referendum.

You’d imagine, therefore, that Mr Moore – who is paid a whopping £134,565 a year (plus expenses) by the taxpayer, about £5,000 more than the First Minister – would be thrilled to have a genuine task to undertake in return for his vast salary. Yet here we see him once again openly abdicating the only real responsibility of his office, in the hope that a member of the general public will do it for him at their own expense.

We can’t be the only people who find that odd, surely?

One ought to have some sympathy for Michael Moore. Secretary Of State for Scotland is such a pointless job the Liberal Democrats stood for election in 2010 on a policy of abolishing it altogether, but now one of their own has found himself in the not-very-hot seat the pledge appears to have gone the way of all Lib Dem election pledges.

With much of the business of running Scotland (education, health, policing) devolved to the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, and the rest of it (taxation, welfare, defence) controlled far above his head in Westminster, the unfortunate Mr Moore must therefore cast around hopefully for something with which to fill the long working day.

Latterly, he’s chosen to occupy himself by making assertions to anyone who’ll listen that the wrangling between Holyrood and London over the independence referendum must be concluded by next month. There appears to be no particular reason for this arbitrary deadline, and Mr Moore has made no explicit threat of consequences should it be breached, presumably because they would carry absolutely no credibility.

(The notion of Alex Salmond standing up in the Scottish Parliament in, say, early December and accepting a single-question referendum in return for a Section 30 order, only to be rebuffed by the Prime Minister on the grounds that he’d missed his chance, is so farcical we’re not even going to dignify it with any further analysis.)

Indeed, so hollow is the position of Scottish Secretary that the First Minister hasn’t even bothered to meet with Mr Moore to discuss the issue in recent months, quite reasonably indicating that he’d rather speak to the organ-grinder than the monkey. Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, perhaps aware that he’s currently trailing badly in this blog’s “Madman Of The Year” poll, today suggests that the organ-grinder in question may yet impose a Westminster-run referendum on the Scots, even in the same breath as acknowledging that such a move would be suicidally stupid and tear the Unionist alliance catastrophically asunder.

There are over two years until the SNP’s proposed date for the referendum, and therefore at least a year until its details absolutely must be finalised. That’s not our opinion, nor even that of the nationalists – it’s the view of the No camp, who’ve been insisting since the 2011 election that the referendum could be held in 2013 (or even sooner). If Mr Moore believed in February of this year that a referendum could be put together from scratch in 19 months, what’s his sudden rush now? Clearly, by his own reckoning, we’ve got until at least March to get the process going in earnest.

If Alex Salmond’s plan is to sit back, innocently whistling, and wait for his opponents to defeat themselves in a flailing rage that he won’t do what they tell him, Mr Moore and Mr Cochrane’s steadily-increasing panic suggests that it’s working. We suspect he’ll keep his powder dry a while yet.

An alert reader points out a story in today’s edition of the once-popular regional periodical. See if you can pick out the curious inconsistency.

Headline: “Concern at decline in PE teacher numbers under SNP”

Third sentence: “However, schools have made up the shortfall by appointing additional PE teachers on temporary contracts – most of them part-time – which has led to an overall increase.”

We’ve emphasised some of the words as a clue. Did you get it?

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As keen readers will know, this blog is often to be found lamenting the disappointing standards upheld by the Scottish media. We’re especially dismayed when fully-staffed professional newspapers fail to catch spelling errors and typos, such as the one that crept into Brian Monteith’s latest batshit-mental ponderings for the Scotsman.

While bafflingly castigating Alex Salmond for failing to have the referendum at a time advantageous to the Unionist parties, Conservative pundit and former MSP Mr Monteith has inexplicably left an “L” out of one of the words in this sentence:

“Then can we all move on and get back to the real world of sorting out the nation’s problems like having jobs for our youth and care facilities for our elderly”

Sloppily, none of the Scotsman’s subs caught the error. Can you help them, readers?

We were frankly staggered today to see that the Herald is still determined to flog the dead and rotting horse that is the Martin Sime “scandal”. It had seemed that the paper had slunk away with its “exclusive” between its legs after the widespread contempt generated by the first story, but incredibly it seems doggedly insistent on destroying the remaining shreds of its journalistic integrity by digging the hole even deeper.

The original piece was written by the Herald’s new political editor Magnus Gardham, until recently a faithful servant of the staunchly Unionist and staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Record. Entitled “Salmond in secret push to obtain a devo max option”, the story didn’t present a scrap of evidence of Salmond doing anything, secretly or otherwise. In fact, it was fabricated almost entirely from empirical lies, from the headline down. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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