Many pundits are of the opinion that the new Tory Max government will be actively hostile to the BBC, which the party has long believed is an expensive public-sector hotbed of right-on lefties. So when we did our latest poll, it seemed worth finding out how much the people of Scotland valued the state broadcaster.
There were, let’s say, some interesting quirks.
Much of the commentariat and media has been in a froth for the last 24 hours about the supposed failure of the nation’s pollsters to predict the Conservative victory. This, for example, was Labour’s highly-paid election guru David Axelrod:
But the truth is that the polls – just like the heavily-maligned exit poll which turned out to be bang on the money – got nothing wrong. The people interpreting them did.
Children’s author, billionaire and Labour donor JK Rowling, last year:
You feeling that popularity yet, readers?
An awkward time for poor Kezia Dugdale on the radio this morning.
We’ll just leave that there to help you out, Kez.
This morning we noted the weird double standards of the media when it comes to reporting politics-related violence (and/or the absence thereof) in Scotland. We weren’t expecting such a good illustration of it to come along within two hours.
Amazingly enough, the Scottish press today ISN’T wall-to-wall with stories about Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, UK peer and lawmaker, endorsing the “f***ing booting” of Conservative supporters at the weekend, in a striking contrast to when a young SNP candidate said similar but less offensive things some months ago.
(Lord McConnell’s friends were talking in the future tense about something they would do. Mhairi Black was talking in the past tense, about things which she HADN’T done.)
As far as we’ve seen, the small piece above in the Scottish Sun is the only coverage. (The Daily Record, as well as not reporting the McConnell comments at all, actually has another go at Mhairi Black instead.)
But we were having trouble recalling any “hate-filled violent mobs” (McConnell’s actual full quote) on the Yes/SNP side. And so was an alert reader who had a dig through the papers from the last couple of years.
This is the Labour-supporting Sunday People today:
And this is its Labour-supporting sister paper the Sunday Mail:
But it’s not as simple as it sounds.
Do you remember the Labour and media outrage a while back when SNP candidate Mhairi Black said she felt like “putting the nut” on some gloating Unionists at the indyref count, readers? Remember the pious scandal at such dreadful thuggery? (If you’d forgotten, don’t worry, because it’s in the Telegraph again today.)
Remember how the Daily Record and Scotsman have now been hammering away for a full week at another SNP candidate, Neil Hay, for tweeting a link to a satirical website and arguably being slightly rude about a small subset of pensioners, while glossing over a lengthy catalogue of abusive tweets calling the SNP “fascists” and “Nazis” (and more) from a prominent Labour activist and BBC pundit?
There’s your actual former First Minister and peer of the UK realm, Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, setting the example Labour would have everyone follow today by celebrating a threat to “f*****g boot” any Tories in Wishaw (we’re not told whether the young ladies in question were Labour activists he was with or just Labour voters).
But there’s more.
The Daily Mirror’s “Ampp3d” offshoot used to be a fantastic resource for statistical debunking, and sometimes still is. But ever since it’s been officially absorbed into the Mirror, it’s been increasingly deployed as a Labour spin tool.
Today it tries to juggle numbers to excuse Gordon Brown’s bargain-basement sale of the UK’s gold reserves in 1999 – a subject that was raised by an audience member on last night’s Question Time special and which we now know with certainty cost the country a whopping $19bn (or £12.5bn at current exchange rates).
We’ve added the emphasis on that last sentence. And it’s a fair enough point broadly speaking, although of course with the gold sell-off we’re looking back with the benefit of hindsight about what actually did happen, not trying to guess, so calling it “fantasy maths” is somewhat inaccurate, given that it’s exactly the opposite of a fantasy.
The trouble is that Ampp3d isn’t always so dismissive of predicting the future.
Scottish Labour branch office manager Jim Murphy will be appearing on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Call Kaye” programme from 9am today, taking questions from voters as well as presenter Kaye Adams. The phone number to ring in is 0500 92 95 00.
Below are a few posers readers might like to put to Mr Murphy, because he seems to have been adept at avoiding them throughout the campaign. Feel free to reword them.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
