Wings Over Scotland

The latest Scottish circulation figures for UK print media are out, and perhaps to nobody’s great surprise they show a continuing sharp decline, as well as the breaking of a significant barrier – for the first time, total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland have slumped below a million, at 986,657 (down from 1,078,544 in the previous period).

The Herald and Scotsman both show heavy falls (13.2% and 8.3% respectively), and while the Herald still holds a clear lead over its broadsheet rival the gap has closed slightly, from 11,000 to 8000. The story is different for the Sunday versions, with the Sunday Herald (which underwent a dramatic format change during the period, from a traditional paper to a magazine-style offering) losing a whopping 31% (down to just 29,000), while Scotland On Sunday lost a more modest 9%, down to 46,000, doubling its lead over its rival from 9000 to 18,000.

Over in tabloid territory things are much the same, with the Daily Record dropping 9%, losing further ground to the Scottish Sun which dropped just 6% and now leads its once-dominant rival by a hefty 47,000 copies a day. (More than the entire daily circulation of the Herald.)

There are falls across the board (the bizarre Scotophobia of the Independent now finds just 7,000 daily takers north of the border), with one exception – the closure of the News Of The World has seen huge jumps for most of the tabloid Sundays. The People leaps 85%, the Sunday Mirror 83% and the Star more than doubles its sales, with a 120% boost taking it past both SoS and the Sunday Herald to just under 60,000.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, though, is that the traditional Sunday tabloids of choice in Scotland – the Sunday Post and the Sunday Mail – see nothing of this benefit. The Mail picks up just 3%, and the Post actually manages to drop 1% despite the loss of their major tabloid competition.

However, the big two now comfortably outsell everything else put together (587,000 for the Mail and Post combined, versus 441,000 for the other 11 titles), because many of the NOTW’s readers haven’t moved anywhere else but have simply stopped buying a Sunday paper entirely (or are buying one fewer) – of around 240,000 people who used to buy it, increases in the other Sundays amount to only 70,000 or so, a huge loss to the overall sector of 170,000 sales a week.

The oddest anomaly remains the performance of the two Daily Mail titles, which both fall but narrowly stay above six figures, and outsell their respective daily and Sunday equivalents on the Herald and Scotsman added together. This perhaps tells us more about the Mail’s true position on the tabloid-broadsheet spectrum than anything more significant, but it’s still a jarring statistic in a Tory-hostile nation.

What political conclusions can we draw from this? In the absence of website readership figures, perhaps not many. But it seems clear that the attention of the Scottish public is being drawn increasingly away from printed media and towards the internet. That’s an area where the nationalists have several years of a head start in terms of presence – the online communities of even staunchly Unionist papers like the Scotsman and Record are dominated by the pro-SNP camp – and it’ll be interesting to see if the opposition can do anything to catch up.

The backlash against Iain Gray's ill-judged and mendacious valedictory speech to the Scottish Labour conference continues today, as Sue Varley over on Newsnet Scotland presents what's billed as an impartial outsider's take on the supposedly mutual loathing between Labour and the SNP. While NNS itself is far from neutral, she finds what I suspect most neutral observers would – that the much-maligned army of "cybernats" is on the whole far more civilly behaved, and more committed to at least attempting reasoned and evidence-based debate, than Labour's own online activist battalions. A measured and worthwhile read.

There's a strong and thoughtful piece from new Better Nation editor Kirsty Connell today about how the opposition in Scotland is failing the fight against poverty, and others are picking up the slack. It's heartening to know that there are at least a few people outside the SNP turning away from what Connell describes with dismay as "the broken tactic of opposition for opposition’s sake".

Just as Hamish McDonnell catches up (for the Independent) with the Scotsman's unattributed three-day-old story about the possibility of the Unionist parties combining to hold their own Westminster-run independence referendum, the Herald once again acts like something approaching a proper newspaper and manages to get an actual on-the-record quote from an actual MP – the Shadow Scottish Secretary, no less – comprehensively rubbishing the idea. As you were, then.

The Scotsman today wastes its front page on an even more pointless piece of anti-SNP scaremongering than usual. Despite the UK government having repeatedly made clear that it will not seek to place any obstacles in the way of the Scottish Parliament holding an independence referendum, the paper drags up a previously unheard-of "expert" from Glasgow University to insist in strident terms that the poll will be unlawful and that the Westminster administration must conduct the vote immediately instead. No suggestion is offered in the article as to who might actually be mounting any theoretical legal challenge to the referendum bill, given that the UK government has already explicitly said it wouldn't.

The entire story is a piece of delusional fantasy roughly equivalent to a tramp standing on the beach shouting at the tide not to come in. It's barely possible to imagine what the Scotsman hopes to achieve with this sort of witless nat-bashing drivel, other than to increasingly irritate the Scottish electorate with constant assertions of their inferiority. (Or as the paper itself put it recently, "Even from a Unionist perspective it would be self-defeating. Nothing could be more calculated to provoke Scottish resentment, leading to an electoral backlash, than such high-handed behaviour.")

Speaking from a nationalist perspective, long may they continue.

…seems to be the underlying message of a faintly extraordinary blog by Simon Johnson in the Telegraph today. Reacting to the suggestion (which appears to be solely his own) that the SNP will stage the independence referendum in 2014 to take advantage of patriotic events like the Commonwealth Games and the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, Johnson suggests that the plan could backfire.

"2014 is also the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War and the 75th anniversary of the Second World War. This would provide the Unionists with ample opportunity to remind the Scottish people how they stood together with the English, Welsh and Northern Irish to defeat Nazism."

It's a fair point, and if by 2014 the Nazi threat is indeed once again looming over Europe, it may well affect the outcome of the referendum. But if the Unionists are already reduced to crossing their fingers for the rise of a new Hitler to stop the SNP, it would seem they're in even more desperate straits than anyone thought.

Iain Macwhirter on his own blog, acting like a proper grown-up journalist and actually doing the research on the "Would Scotland be allowed into the EU?" debate:

"I've just been looking at the latest report to hit the front pages.  It came from the House of Commons Library and it is a background briefing note, not an authoritative assessment of the Scotland's legal status within the EU. It carries its own health warning:  "[This briefing note]  should not be relied upon as legal or professional advice or as a substitute for it.  A suitably qualified professional should be consulted.""

One of the most dismaying aspects of the state of Scottish politics is the way that the weekly Holyrood joust between the party leaders appears to be conducted solely for the benefit of those in the chamber, with no regard at all for the watching electorate. This week's episode was a case in point.

Iain Gray chose to spend his entire allotted time battering on about whether an independent Scotland would automatically become a member of the EU, and under what conditions, particularly in terms of currency. This, we'd hazard, is somewhere near the bottom of the average voter's priorities at the moment – given that we're several years away from having to think about it, and that the way things are going you wouldn't necessarily want to bet your mortgage on the EU and/or the Euro existing at all by then –  but the opposition sense a weakness (not unreasonably) in the Scottish Government's disappointing refusal to release its legal advice on the subject, and so we get a concerted attempt to score a fairly meaningless playground point rather than usefully addressing any real-world issues of actual concern to the Scottish people.

As the session showed, the simple fact is that nobody knows what will happen with regard to Scotland's EU membership in the event of independence, not least because it's a decision wholly outside the influence of anyone in Holyrood. Both sides were able to quote a litany of sources supporting their respective views, none of them in any way definitive, and the exchange ended with nobody any the wiser, resulting only in the generation of massive heat but absolutely no light. (FMQs does seem to be a bottomless well of the former, and so is perhaps the ultimate in renewable energy sources. Who needs oil?)

Ruth Davidson's debut appearance at the front of the Conservative benches was no better than Gray's ineffectual jabbing, pointlessly repeating the futile demand that the Unionist parties have been making for the past seven months – namely that the SNP should hold the referendum immediately. It's perhaps fitting that on the eve of Armistice Day, the spiritual leader of the Union would choose to adopt the Douglas Haig approach to battle: if you've got a strategy and it's failing again and again and again, keep doing it anyway just in case the 50th time is the charm. The SNP are extremely well entrenched on the high ground here – having clearly laid out their proposed timing in the election campaign and getting an unprecedented mandate from the electorate – and Davidson's feeble shelling didn't so much as scuff the barbed wire.

Willie Rennie's question was so boring we've forgotten it already, and the entire spectacle was an unedifying waste of everyone's time. And since the agenda of FMQs is set by the opposition leaders, for that they must carry most of the blame.

Ever since the SNP's victory in May, Unionist politicians of all flavours have been going on and on about making "the positive case for the Union", a thing which apparently exists but which none of them have as yet been able to actually define. The only specific example of this positive case so far has come from the new Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, who pointed out that being in the Union enabled us to enjoy the performances of the GB team at the Olympics.

(An event which has directly sucked money out of Scotland and down to London, and which mystifyingly enjoys a different tax status to the forthcoming 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, which our sources tell us is in Scotland.)

Over on Better Nation, though, Labour activist Aidan Skinner (one of the few who seems to have any grasp of the scale and nature of the party in Scotland's predicament) has had a stab at it. Apparently the "coherent and convincing" case for the Union is that it enhances Scotland's "shared defence and commercial interests".

Further details are unforthcoming in the piece, however, which raises more questions than it answers. It doesn't explain, for example, how Scotland's interests are served by years of UK government underspending on defence in Scotland (as identified by Professor Andrew Hughes Hallett), the siting in Scotland of nuclear weapons which are overwhelmingly opposed by the Scottish electorate, or UK foreign policy which makes the entire UK at greater risk of terrorist attack. Nor, oddly, is any nation state which poses a military threat to Scotland identified.

Similarly, the single sentence devoted to this "coherent and convincing case" neglects to clarify any specific instances of Westminster control of Scotland's economy bringing commercial benefits. We're sure there are many, though, and look forward to reading them when the No campaign finally gets round to publishing "The Positive Case For The Union" through Her Majesty's Stationery Office, which we're currently expecting some time around 2017.

The Scotsman's lead politics story today is a fairly bog-standard run through the "too wee, too poor, too stupid" routine. The line is that if Scotland was independent AND in the Euro it would be liable for an £8bn contribution to the Euro bailout fund. It's an assumption constructed entirely from individual building-blocks of nonsense piled up on top of one another (Scotland isn't going to be independent for four or five years at least, and nobody knows what the status of the Eurozone is going to be four or five days from now, never mind half a decade; the SNP have clearly stated that their policy on independence would be to retain Sterling for an inspecified period of time; the issue of whether an independent Scotland would be an EU member at all, and on what terms, is contentious to put it mildly; and so on), and indeed below the thunderous headline the piece grudgingly acknowledges them, but we should probably expect the Scotsman to keep banging away at the issue of Scotland's pathetic inadequacy as a prospective nation every day or two from now until the referendum.

Time has an interview with Alex Salmond today. The US-based magazine has a commendable stab at covering a fairly alien subject, but drops a number of clangers of varying bizarreness. They initially claimed the SNP had formed a coalition with Labour in 2007, but have since (semi-)corrected that to the slightly less-wrong but nonsensical assertion that "the SNP formed a minority government with Labour". In the next sentence they note that "The party's growth has spiked, from six seats in 2005 to an outright majority of 69 seats after a landslide victory earlier this year", rather misleadingly neglecting to point out – or perhaps to know – that they're comparing Westminster election results to Holyrood ones.

There's a real cracker a couple of paragraphs further on, though, when the magazine suggests that "A Sunday Mirror poll out in mid-October found that 49% of Scots and 39% of Britons overall support independence, up from 11% and 6%, respectively, five months ago". Blimey, we knew there was an upwards trend, but 11% to 49% in five months is a little much. (Even if you assume it's just a rogue extra "from" that's snuck in, we're not sure there's been a poll with 38% support for independence recently. Also, the 49% figure is presumably the poll that was built from a tiny Scottish sub-sample, and therefore pretty much meaningless anyway.)

Next up we get "Salmond plans to hold a referendum on independence before the end of his term in 2015", but we'll forgive them that one because countless UK and even Scottish media outlets have made the same careless error – the current Holyrood term ends in 2016, not 2015. Less forgivable (though also perpetrated repeatedly by the UK media) is the bald statement that "The referendum will have two questions", since that has never been the official position of the SNP or anyone else, and is looking less likely to be the reality with every passing day.

But, y'know, otherwise bang on the money, guys.

A fairly in-depth lead piece on the "devo max" conundrum, including an interview with referendum expert Dr Matt Qvortrup who, under very determined and persistent questioning from an unhappy Glenn Campbell, offered the professional opinion that a notional two-question poll where Q1 was "Do you want more powers for the Scottish Parliament?" and Q2 was "Do you also want full independence?" would be both legitimate and fair, and also that in his view, a vote of 51% for independence in such a scenario would mean independence for Scotland, regardless of whether the "devo max" question received a higher vote.

The unambiguous clarification of Dr Qvortrup's position was welcome given the strenuous attempts by the Unionist parties to misrepresent it last week, after the First Minister gave what turned out to be an entirely accurate summary of Dr Qvortrup's views, but one based on an erroneous source. Dr Qvortrup confirmed that he'd spoken to the First Minister and accepted his "misquote" was an honest error rather than an attempt to portray his views inaccurately.

The episode also featured a piece on whether the Scottish Conservatives can recover from the divisions caused by their leadership contest, in which party donor John McGlynn called for a change in direction.