Wings Over Scotland

Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 March 2017)
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We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.

Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.

It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:

Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.

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There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.

It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.

Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.

And it’s not hard to see why.

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It seems counter-intuitive – given Rupert Murdoch’s often-overstated (despite endless and fevered speculation, the Scottish Sun didn’t back a Yes vote) but still seemingly real support for Scottish independence – that Sky News should be seen as the most hostile of the nation’s broadcasters to the Yes movement.

Yet such it is.

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The announcement that the Scottish Government would seek the uncontested legal right to hold a second independence referendum met with an outpouring of rage and ignorance from the massed ranks of the UK media that was in one sense entirely predictable yet still startling in its fury and ferocity.

Most prominent was the assertion, stated as fact by every pundit and broadcaster – including those required by law to be fair and impartial – that a second referendum would be conducted in the environment of a significantly worse economic case.

And that’s a remarkable claim, because the indisputable fact is that nobody has the slightest clue what the economic case for No will be.

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Judging by the first 24 hours, we’re in for a two-year festival of utter horror from the UK and Scottish media. Yesterday saw a never-ending parade of metrosplaining idiots dragged willingly in front of cameras and microphones to pontificate their clueless and mind-numbingly ignorant drivel about Scotland.

It wasn’t possible to keep track of it all, because it was frequently happening on five channels at once, and it was harder still to watch it for any extended period of time without hurling a brick through the screen in frustration at the offensive stupidity of it.

Feeding into that was a stream of Scottish politicians who actually did know better, but who are too catastrophically dim to adapt to changing circumstances and had no strategy other than to endlessly repeat the same cretinous soundbites over and over.

(Adam Tomkins in particular was ubiquitous, spending what felt like several hours on various airwaves reciting the same brainless 10-second schtick forever.)

The constitutional politics of the UK and Scotland are in flux, and many aspects of the situation are complicated. But quite a lot of them aren’t, and if we’re all going to make it through the next two years without stabbing each other in the throat, it’d be a lot better if everyone accepted the things that are definite, empirical, indisputable facts.

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Alert readers will of course be aware that one of this site’s most frequently-recurring themes is “phantom news”, whereby events or unpleasant opinions that newspapers or broadcasters really want to have happened are conveniently brought to life, either by some random nobody on the internet, or an unnamed “source” or “insider”.

(Or in a real emergency, simply asserted with no evidence at all.)

So when Nicola Sturgeon did something today that nearly everyone in the Northern Hemisphere knew she was going to do sometime soon, but wasn’t expecting just yet, there wasn’t time to prepare actual real people with the required quotes.

In the modern media world, though, that isn’t a problem.

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We haven’t said much about the huge furore whipped up by the Guardian in recent days around spurious allegations of racism/online abuse by supporters of Scottish independence, made first by Sadiq Khan and then by a deranged “Better Together” activist who also thinks all vegans are racist (or something).

Partly that’s because we covered the initial speech by Khan and the fallout from it pretty extensively, and partly because we didn’t want to feed the Guardian’s clickbait.

However, when the activist who was allegedly “hounded off Twitter” in fear for her life – fear caused by supposed comments that nobody has actually seen – miraculously recovered her bravery less than a week later (coincidentally just in time for the launch of her book), we thought it was probably time someone started keeping some records.

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We were very pleased to hear Gary Robertson challenge Kezia Dugdale on the curious matter of Scottish Labour’s membership and income figures on today’s Good Morning Scotland. Dugdale flapped and dodged and waffled for as long as she could before diverting the topic onto federalism, and eventually managed to wriggle away from the subject without any sort of proper answer (through no fault of Robertson’s).

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 24 February 2017)
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But what she said just made the situation MORE confusing, not less.

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Almost a year ago we ran a short piece mocking a Scotsman headline which claimed that “THOUSANDS” of people had signed a Tory anti-referendum petition, when the actual number was a strictly-accurate-but-pathetic TWO thousand.

We didn’t think that could ever be beaten for technically-true hyperbolic exaggeration, but we’d reckoned without the bold boundary-pushing ingenuity of the Daily Express.

Hundreds of thousands? How many hundreds, exactly?

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