Wings Over Scotland

Without setting out deliberately to be so, a site like Wings Over Scotland is inherently cynical. If you set yourself up to monitor the media, it’s implicit that you think the media needs monitoring. And as a professional journalist, both staff and freelance, for over 20 years, I’ve seen enough shady goings-on not to be shocked very often.

But today, for perhaps the first time since starting the site, I find myself genuinely filled with anger, disgust and contempt for the people plying my trade in Scotland.

Today’s Scotland On Sunday lead story isn’t even remotely close to the first time we’ve seen a Scottish newspaper cross the line from spin and smear into outright lie. It is, however, by a very considerable distance the most despicable.

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Sadly these pieces all arrived too late to be included in yesterday’s round-up and poll. But all of them are still pretty unmissable reading. (And didn’t we tell you weeks ago that Kevin McKenna was starting to see the light? Oh ye of little faith.)

LABOUR STILL LOST IN THE WILDERNESS
(Herald View in the Herald)

“Denied power at Holyrood for a second term, Labour appear so warped by their tribal hatred of the Nationalists that they would rather align with the Coalition than the SNP. Instead of recognising a fellow progressive force, they would rather collude in dismantling the welfare state. It is a pitiful sight.”

LABOUR’S WRETCHED SILENCE ON CHILD POVERTY
(Kevin McKenna for the Observer)

“Ms Lamont’s use of the phrase “something for nothing”, as well as coming straight from the grimoire of Margaret Thatcher is, at best, misleading, at worst, downright false… It’s difficult to assess which body of Labour supporters will be most insulted and alienated.”

HOW DID THE PARTY OF SMITH AND DEWAR COME TO THIS?
(Iain Macwhirter for the Herald)

“As a presentational disaster this ranks alongside John Major’s back to basics speech which helped seal the fate of the UK Conservatives in the 1990s. There has been a whiff of decay around Scottish Labour for some years, but I’m beginning to think it has finally popped its clogs.”

LABOUR THROWN INTO A CRISIS
(Socialist Party Scotland for socialistworld.net)

“Labour’s leader has signalled her support for a vicious extension of the cuts agenda and the tearing up of those modest but important advances that still survive in Scotland. In doing so she could also sound the death of Labour in Scotland.”

It’s been hard to keep up with the avalanche of opprobrium that’s been poured onto Johann Lamont’s head since Tuesday, as nationalists, commentators and Labour loyalists alike have all reacted with shock and horror to her craven, mendacious abandonment of the last shreds of the once-great party’s ideology.

(Even the most foaming of Labour’s ultra-staunch comment-thread attack dogs, such as Left Foot Forward’s absurd “Newsbot9”, called it “political suicide”.)

We can’t help but note the irony in the fact that Scottish Labour’s first ever full-blown, supposedly-independent leader is the one who has eliminated the final vestiges of difference between the more traditional Scottish party and its neoliberal London parent.

So to save you scouring the internet haphazardly, we’ve gathered together our top 10 picks of the bunch for some leisurely weekend reading. And just for fun, you can vote for your favourite in the poll in the central column. It’s no easy task. Enjoy.

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…is unfortunate, twice is careless, and three times in quick succession starts to look like a trend. Sober viewers may recall a post from a few days ago, in which we noted the latest example of the Herald’s increasingly-frequent habit of telling outright lies. It turns out that the formerly-respectable publication was being even more economical with the truth than we knew, as a tiny piece in a corner of today’s edition reveals*:

Still, it was nothing too serious. The original piece only exaggerated the number of turbines by around 400%, and the potential area to be covered by the new development by a trifling 3,300%. (In addition to suggesting that the land was to be sold off to private industry whereas in fact it was remaining in public ownership.) Apart from those few minor issues, the story was almost entirely accurate.

The Herald is currently circling the drain. We can’t imagine why.

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*We’re indebted to keen-eyed reader “McHaggis” for pointing out the correction to us.

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?