Wings Over Scotland

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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By now most of you should have seen the latest circulation figures for newspapers in Scotland. As you’ll know, though, Wings Over Scotland likes to delve around below the headlines when it comes to stats, so we’ve had our own rummage, done a little data-bashing and come up with a few hopefully-interesting findings.

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We live, perhaps more than at any time in history, in a world characterised by open lies. Only this week, the coalition government was caught red-handed understating the number of school playing-field closures under its administration by 50%. A punk band in Russia singing a protest song about the President’s attacks on human rights are accused of religious hatred, in a show trial every bit as transparently corrupt as anything Stalin or Hitler would have ordered.

Meanwhile in the West, a man dedicated to exposing truth and criminal activities is wanted by the USA to put on trial for espionage. Democratically elected politicians in the “home of the free” call for him to be executed or extra-judicially assassinated as a terrorist. Conversely, the same man portrays as political persecution attempts to have him extradited to another country to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

(We’re surprised that the UK authorities don’t solve the problem at a stroke by simply getting Kenny Farquharson of the Scotsman to determine whether Assange is guilty or innocent while he’s still in the Ecuadorian embassy. After all, Kenny is apparently able to judge these things without all the tedious and time-consuming business of presenting evidence, hearing a defence and establishing or corroborating facts. So long as the accused doesn’t have access to highly-paid lawyers, of course.)

Here in Scotland things are no different. In the last week alone, two senior Unionist politicians have perpetrated enormous and deliberate lies cynically calculated to poison and undermine discourse. Ian Davidson and Willie Rennie have made inflammatory statements no intelligent human being could possibly believe to be true (we’ll pass tactfully over the issue over whether such a definition in fact includes either man), and angrily reasserted them when challenged.

There is only one purpose for actions like these. They are knowingly designed to create an intimidatory atmosphere where journalists are cowed into following the agenda desired by the culprits, and deflected from areas that said culprits don’t wish reported on. The wider intent is to control the media by recalibrating the centre ground of “impartiality”, and thereby achieve a strategic shift of coverage in their favour.

Here’s how it works.

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Strap yourselves in, readers. And scatter some cushions around your chair, because there’s a pretty good chance you’re about to fall off it. Not in surprise, though, because as we predicted yesterday the Scottish media has imposed a near-blanket ban on reporting Labour MP and Scottish Affairs Select Committee chairman Ian Davidson’s astonishing meltdown on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight Scotland.

The Herald buried a small neutral piece on it yesterday afternoon in an obscure corner of its website, with no bylines and no quotes from any of the parties (in either sense of the word) concerned. Interestingly the exact same story appears word-for-word in the Daily Record, still without attribution, but that’s it for news coverage.

On the BBC website there’s not a peep, even in the Scotland Politics section, despite the direct and savage attack on the Corporation’s prized impartiality. (Political editor Brian Taylor hasn’t graced the site with a blog in six weeks.) Over at the Guardian, the paper’s fearless Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell – normally so keen to cover media matters – felt a five-minute fuss over an advertising poster at Edinburgh Airport was the big Scottish story of the day. And so on.

The Twittersphere was also strangely quiet, or at least the Union-friendly side of it was. Tom Gordon of the Herald and Eddie Barnes of the Scotsman both tried to play the story down as a storm in a teacup (here’s a fun game to play: imagine the Scottish media reaction if Stewart Hosie or Alex Neil had done the same thing, especially during the political slow news season), and every normally-prolific Scottish Labour activist adopted a policy of total radio silence on the subject.

Only Angus Macleod of the Times went public to suggest that Johann Lamont should discipline Davidson for his “bonkers” outburst, while Al Jazeera reporter (and former Scottish Labour senior media adviser) Andrew McFadyen called the performance a “bad misjudgement” directed at “one of the best broadcasters in Scotland”, while noting that the point of politicians giving interviews to TV news programmes is supposed to be “to win people over, not put them off”.

We were just about to congratulate ourselves on our powers of insight when we noticed a link hidden right down at the bottom of the Scotsman’s politics section. “Michael Kelly: Showdown has put BBC objectivity to the test”, it said. We went and made ourselves a drink. “This should be good”, we thought. We weren’t disappointed.

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We must confess to rarely finding ourselves either surprised or impressed by the Scotsman. Today, though, is one of those days. The staunchly Unionist paper’s leader column features a detailed assessment of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee’s latest pronouncements on the independence referendum, and it’s a damning one.

Under the headline “Law derives authority only from the people it serves”, the piece basically reprises this site’s feature from last weekend on sovereignty, and dismisses the report’s findings as in essence an irrelevant technicality, lecturing that “it is clear the committee has fundamentally misunderstood the way modern democracy works”.

The column’s appraisal of the political reality is unambiguous:

“The law only derives its authority from the people it is there to serve. No court, in Scotland or the United Kingdom, whatever its formal powers under law, can flout the will of the people. No court can say to the Scots: “This far and no further”. The select committee might like to ponder on this before attempting to fix the boundary of the march of the nation by putting spurious legal impediments in the way of the people determining their future.”

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic statement this is. Accusing the report of relying on biased “experts” for its conclusions, the editorial is a humiliating slap-down to Ian Davidson and the other members of his committee, which is left looking petty, partisan, arrogant and foolish even in the eyes of its own supporters. It also represents a direct and unequivocal assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, over the Westminster parliament the committee is a mouthpiece for.

We can only speculate as to whether the column is motivated by a genuine belief in that principle or by a realisation of the tactical blunder the Unionist parties have made, but either way it’s a remarkable development. We wouldn’t want to be in Mr Davidson’s shoes right now. One of his most steadfast allies has just given him a doing.

They tried their best, bless ’em. Held it in as long as they could.

But it always comes out – twice in three minutes, on this occasion – in the end.

There seem to be a lot of things disappearing from the Scottish media today. First the interesting Robbie Dinwoodie story on Olympic football in the Herald does the Bermuda-Triangle routine, and then we see this odd piece in The Scotsman. It opens powerfully, promising to refute (or at least contest) one of the commonest and most compelling arguments made in favour of independence:

“ED MILIBAND has attacked the SNP’s suggestion that Scots face a choice of either independence or Conservative rule from Westminster as the Labour leader made his latest intervention in the referendum debate.”

We’ve read the rest of the short article three times now, however, without being able to locate a single sentence in which Mr Miliband (pictured in the piece as the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) refers to said choice in even the most oblique passing manner, far less “attacks” it. We’re rather keen to hear the official Labour answer, too. Can any eagle-eyed readers help us out?