Wings Over Scotland

It’s been a very slow news day today and it’s chucking it down outside, so we found ourselves stuck for entertainment. Earlier this afternoon alert readers will have noticed us tweeting about breaking through 35,000 Twitter followers, and while we were comparing that to various other entities for our own amusement (eg it’s over 10,000 more followers than Scottish Labour, the Scottish Conservatives and the Scottish Lib Dems put together), we stumbled across this feature from 16 months ago.

And because – as readers of our Panelbase polling features will know – there’s nothing we like more than the occasional wallow in some stats, we got to work.

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From today’s Media Guardian:

“Despite the huge interest and debate around the Scottish independence referendum, BBC Radio Scotland saw its figures fall for the third quarter of this year.

The station had a weekly reach of 870,000 listeners between 23 June and 14 September (the period accounted for by these audience figures) ahead of the independence vote on 18 September.

BBC Radio Scotland was down 2% on the year and 8.9% on the previous three months.

The BBC faced intense criticism of bias in its coverage of the referendum from pro-independence supporters, with a demonstration outside the corporation’s Glasgow headquarters and participants unfurling a banner calling for political editor Nick Robinson to be sacked.”

It’s worth taking just a few lines to examine those stats more closely.

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Today’s Herald carries a report from the initial meeting of the Smith Commission on “enhanced devolution” for the Scottish Parliament. The paper quotes from what seems to be a press release issued by the Commission, in which it explains that it thinks the people of Scotland are idiotic, drooling simpletons who’ll swallow anything.

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The Labour-friendly elements of the press made much play yesterday of an Ipsos MORI poll which showed an unusually high level of support in the UK for remaining in the EU (while ignoring one by YouGov that showed a majority in favour of leaving).

But a piece in today’s Times throws the reality into sharp relief, and illustrates why the Yes movement hasn’t simply lain down and died after losing the referendum.

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The Scotsman’s lead story last night on the left, and the same page today:

Scottish journalism, there.

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Margaret Curran on last night’s Scotland 2014:

Well, we don’t think anyone can say she didn’t give a full and comprehensive answer on the subject of Scottish Labour’s membership figures there.

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Mark Steel in the Independent, 16 October 2014:

“Maybe one way they can reverse this is to try a more forthright approach, and to start with they could say: ‘If the Scottish are so daft as to believe our vow, maybe that proves they’re not fit to run their own country anyway, the idiots.'”

Craig Murray said something quite similar recently from the other side, as it were, and at the moment we’re finding it quite tough to disagree with either of them.

We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.

And you’d think that’d be bigger news.

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This morning’s Daily Record has a rather panicky-sounding editorial complaining that Yes supporters, from the First Minister down, are refusing to “move on” from the referendum result and are complaining about “betrayal”, especially in the light of yesterday’s joke of a Commons debate. The Record calls for unity and also talks, hilariously, of the “settled will of the Scottish people”.

(What is it, exactly, that the will of the Scottish people is meant to have settled on, given that they had and still have no idea which powers a No vote would bring?)

It rather smacks of the accused in a murder trial saying “Look, sure, I killed and butchered your wife and children, but that was MONTHS ago, let’s just forget about it and get back to normal”, but it’s not actually the point.

Because it’s not the referendum result that most people feel betrayed by. It’s not even the behaviour of the Unionist parties since the vote.

The entity in the dock here is the Daily Record itself – which still claims to be the most-read newspaper in Scotland, although the Scottish Sun sells more copies – and it’s charged with the serious crime of knowingly and deliberately lying to the people of Scotland, while proclaiming itself to be their “Champion”.

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The much-awaited and hastily-extended Westminster debate on Scottish devolution is just about to start in the House of Commons. We’ll be watching it on the Parliament website rather than the BBC, for the obvious reasons.

The dust of the independence referendum is showing a distinct unwillingness to settle. Almost a month from the vote, alien observers would be hard pushed to identify Yes as the beaten side. SNP membership has more than tripled, and that of the Scottish Greens and SSP (much) more than doubled, in three weeks. The moribund Labour Party in Scotland has slumped in both Holyrood and Westminster polls. Newspaper sales figures continue to fall after not a single daily or national newspaper in the country backed the choice of almost half of the population.

Unionist politicians unnerved by the closeness of the result have advocated making independence actually illegal, and the Secretary of State for Portsmouth has issued a series of panicky warnings that the “nationalists” must not seek the best possible outcome from the figleaf Smith Commission (or, presumably, he’ll tell his mum).

Increasingly, the “once in a lifetime” referendum looks like only the opening skirmish.

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From today’s Daily Record:

Better late than never, eh?