Wings Over Scotland

There’s been some breaking news.

Or rather, there hasn’t.

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Broadly speaking, the psychological phenomenon known as the Pollyanna Principle is a tendency to neurotically see the most positive possible view of a situation. It’s not generally widely found in newspapers – for whom bad news as a rule sells much better than good news – but for some reason the Scottish press makes a uniform exception when it comes to military shipbuilding.

This, for example, is today’s Herald:

Now, in itself that headline is – unusually – true, so far as it goes. But it only takes until the first sentence of the article text before things start to fall apart.

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Today the BBC finally officially revealed what everyone already knew.

So now Scottish viewers definitely know where we stand.

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Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.

But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.

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In a month of positive statistics for Scotland – including unexpectedly high economic growth figures, continuing to lead the UK and hitting its own tough targets for hospital waiting times (which drew an incredibly petty and insulting response from Scottish Labour), and huge progress in rail punctuality (now also the best anywhere in the country) – perhaps the most welcome of all was the release yesterday of the lowest unemployment figures for quarter of a century.

(Again the best in the UK, and in fact the best in Scotland of all time, since separate Scottish records only started to be kept in 1992.)

The Scotsman commendably gave the glad tidings top billing on its front page.

But despite it being slow news season, the rest of the media was a little less excited.

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We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.

But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.

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“Colonel” Ruth Davidson took time out from her holidays yesterday to unleash an extraordinary (and unusually defensive) 35-part Twitter tirade about the reaction to her appointment as an honorary military commander. So barren is the summer political news desert that two newspapers put it on their front page today, giving the BBC an excuse to deem it the day’s biggest story.

But that wasn’t the bit that caught our eye.

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The term “fake news” has become somewhat devalued from overuse recently, and often translates simply to “news I disagree with or don’t like”. But this, from today’s Scottish Daily Mail, is a bona fide sighting:

Let’s just break that down.

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Here’s the doom-and-gloom front-page headline of the Herald today:

It refers to a new report from the Nuffield Trust called “Learning From NHS Scotland”. Its 61 pages contain precisely one mention of independence. Let’s see what it said.

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We’re always loath to criticise political journalists for feeble stories published during the summer season, when parliaments are in recess and there’s nothing much happening to fill space with. But the Sunday Post has started pretty early this year.

Let’s see if we can put a number on the degree of “dilution” here, shall we?

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Of all the tropes of the 2014 independence referendum, few were fought over more repeatedly and bitterly, or more dishonestly by the No campaign, than the saga of the Type 26 frigates. The UK government promised Clyde shipbuilders hit hard by years of neglect and job losses that it would build 13 of the state-of-the-art vessels at BAE’s Scotstoun yard, but only if Scots voted No.

Once that vote was secured the number very swiftly dropped to eight, accompanied by a whirlwind of misinformation insisting that there had in fact been no reduction. (As keen social media users will know, this brazen lie was pushed particularly hard by the militarist website UK Defence Journal.)

So we were interested to see a story in today’s Scotland On Sunday which showed how desperate the Unionist side is to cling on to the ships as a future blackmail tool.

The paper has chosen to present the news with a super-positive spin, as you can see from the headline. But the text of the article tells a very different story.

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…on last night’s article.

Because the Daily Mail isn’t standing for any of this confusion. It’s absolutely 100% clear that what’s happened is that the First Minister has U-turned and abandoned the prospect of a second independence referendum.

And also that she’s absolutely refused to do exactly that.

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