Wings Over Scotland

Earlier today we showed you a clip from a press conference in which Alex Salmond schooled the BBC’s Nick Robinson in some basic financial facts about Corporation Tax, and went on to make a serious allegation about wrongdoing between the BBC and the UK Treasury, in which he claimed that the latter had broken Parliamentary rules by leaking market-sensitive information about RBS.

The BBC dutifully reported the story later in the day.

And as far as we can gather, the First Minister has everyone bang to rights.

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Today’s might read something like this:

“In a huge boost for the independence campaign, Royal Bank of Scotland today announced that it would move its registered office from Edinburgh to London in the event of a Yes vote. First Minister Alex Salmond was reported to be delighted that the possible future burden of having to bailout the failed bank had been lifted from the shoulders of the Scottish Government.

(The threat was in fact a mythical one, as bank bailouts are not conducted on the basis of head-office location, but had frequently been rolled out as a scare story by the anti-independence campaign.)

With RBS unlikely to pay any Corporation Tax for decades on account of its gargantuan and ongoing losses from the financial crash, there was no downside for Holyrood, with the bank stating unambiguously in a letter to employees that it had ‘no intention to move operations or jobs’.

(Corporation Tax is in any event levied on where business activity takes place, not where the headquarters is located.)

In other words, an independent Scotland would keep all the benefits of the bank – employment, services and employee taxation and spending – with none of the dangerous liabilities. The news will encourage businesses to invest in the Scottish economy, knowing that their money is secure. The outcome would give an independent Scotland the best of both worlds.”

Just imagine it, viewers. Maybe one day.

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The Daily Record today outlines what it’s pushing hard as a triumphant intervention from Gordon Brown which justifies a No vote in the referendum. (It also claims the credit, comically suggesting its Monday front page drove Brown’s announcement.)

It lists “12 new powers” in Brown’s plan. Let’s take a look.

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We just watched, jaws agape, as the BBC news channel gave Scottish Labour an uninterrupted 50-minute party political broadcast for no immediately obvious reason. It mainly took place at Loanhead Miners’ Welfare, and featured speeches from a warm-up man, then Johann Lamont, and finally Gordon Brown.

The ostensible event justifying this extraordinary coverage lasted just 2m 36s.

And having sat through the whole circus, we still have no idea what it was for.

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You have to laugh.

Anyone would think WE were the ones who’d had to remove, apologise for and pay compensation for defamatory articles about THEM.

Save it from what, exactly? Democracy?

(More here.)

Today’s Daily Mail carries a dismal article under a hysterical essay of a headline reading “Homes vandalised, accused of stealing jobs and an atmosphere of discriminatory intimidation: The savage racism turning Scotland into a no-go zone for the English”. (It actually describes a couple of minor incidents, spread over several years, affecting a single elderly couple in Stirling, without a shred of evidence that they were in fact motivated by their Englishness.)

There are undoubtedly small pockets of anti-English racism to be found in parts of Scotland, like there are small pockets of every kind of racism and prejudice found in every country in the world. But why would any Scottish person ever be driven to feel animosity towards the English – our friends, our family and our neighbours?

Not just because of a few isolated nutters on Facebook, surely?

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Alert readers will already be aware that former Labour MP, minister and nuclear-power lobbyist Brian Wilson is one of our least favourite figures in the independence debate.

A man utterly consumed by tribal hatred of the SNP – even by the standards of Scottish Labour, which is no mean accolade – his Scotsman columns are some of the most mendacious, bilious propaganda to be found in the country, to the extent that we don’t even link to them in our “Zany Comedy Relief” section.

Today, however, he’s outdone himself in spectacular style.

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…you probably write for the Express.

Yesterday we posted a couple of tweets observing the fact that the Scottish media had conspicuously ignored the phenomenon that is The Wee Blue Book. (We’d have made more of the total blanking had we been even a little bit surprised.)

Despite having extensively reported almost every other document published about the referendum debate (such as Sir Tom Hunter’s almost-impenetrable digital-only effort), the press saw nothing at all newsworthy about a 72-page book that’s been downloaded over 400,000 times online and which a small team of complete amateurs had managed to fund, print and distribute more than 250,000 physical copies of in a matter of days, with demand still far outstripping supply.

But it turned out we were being a little unfair.

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If anyone was still harbouring any doubts as to the significance of last night’s poll news, they would surely have been dispelled by this serious, thought-provoking and perceptive analysis on the BBC news channel’s “The Papers” roundup last night.

Of course, the poll might be a rogue. It might just be a temporary bounce from the second Salmond-Darling debate. And it still shows No in front. The Yes campaign will have to redouble its efforts in the last couple of weeks, not start congratulating itself.

But the one thing we can surely all agree on, right across the political divides, is that the most important aspect is whether someone might at some point have been slightly rude to Andrew Lloyd Webber on Twitter or not.