Wings Over Scotland

From today’s Financial Times:

“Buyout groups Blackstone and Blue Water Energy are providing $500m to Siccar Point Energy, a new UK-focused oil company, in one of the largest ever private equity investments in North Sea oil.

Investment in the UK North Sea reached a record level of £14.4bn last year, raising hopes that oil and gas production could start to pick up again after years of decline.

‘This is one of the most opportune times to buy assets in the North Sea,’ said Jonathan Roger, chief executive of Siccar Point. ‘The market is very buoyant.'”

Sounds terrible. No wonder Gordon Brown’s so depressed.

Thank goodness there are only 18 days of the independence campaign remaining. We’re not sure we have the capacity to absorb much more idiocy like the below.

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If you’ll forgive one of my very rare switches to the first-person view, readers, I’ve found the last few days in the independence referendum particularly weird.

That’s because my current life is curiously mirroring my previous one as a videogames journalist. The gaming community is at present mired in a convulsive orgy of the most mindboggling horror over something called “GamerGate”, which I couldn’t even begin to decribe adequately to you, because frankly you wouldn’t believe me and I’m not sure the words exist to do it justice anyway.

By way of illustration of that fact, this article on games website VG24/7 is, genuinely, by far the best, most accurate summary and analysis of the situation that I’ve read. (Twitter followers will already have seen me tweet a couple of random samples of what’s going on. I urge you, if you can, to endure the entirety of that second link, and note that it’s had almost FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND views.)

But while proving that the sort of abusive insanity pervading the world of videogames makes even the absolute worst of indyref name-calling look like two kittens with woolly hats on having a meow-off over who gets first shot at a saucer of milk, the core principles are the same – a tiny handful of total boneheads having their actions blown out of all proportion by the press in a shock-horror frenzy bearing no relation to the actual experiences of 99.9% of people.

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Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.

We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.

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An alert reader drew our attention to a piece in the Telegraph on Monday.

“The pro-UK Better Together campaign said it plans to “turn majority support into a majority vote” by contacting every household at least three times over the next month and every undecided voter at least four times.

Up to a million postal voters will be contacted and more than 25,000 activists will be working to mobilise support for No ahead of polling day. The campaign will also be using advertising on websites such as Facebook to reach 500,000 undecided women.”

Lordy, where to start?

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(Click here to help keep this vital news outlet broadcasting.)

The Times of London (to give it its full title) has been the newspaper of record for the British establishment for 226 years. It was practically the only facet of British life that survived in the dystopian future of George Orwell’s “1984”. Even though it’s now owned by an Australian/American, the brand remains one of the most recognised and iconic symbols of Her Majesty’s United Kingdom, revered across the globe.

(It even created the “Times Roman” font which is the default standard typeface of the English-speaking world, and which these words you’re reading now are displayed in.)

Which means there’s absolutely no excuse for this sort of cobblers.

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Folks, we seriously sometimes think we’re the only people covering Scottish politics who can actually read. Here’s a page from the Scottish Sun this morning:

The paper, last seen struggling to subtract 4 from 5, makes a big and rather huffy point about this apparently being “the first time” that the First Minister has “admitted” that independence won’t be a walk in the park, “with whisky and oil on tap”.

So we have to wonder what the heck they’ve been doing for the last 14 months.

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Earlier today we highlighted some rather ugly tweets (and retweets) from the No campaign’s latest “grassroots” star, Yvonne Hama of Airdrie, who’s apparently a big fan of the BNP’s Nick Griffin and the idea of hanging Catholics from trees.

Within hours of the revelations her Twitter accounts had all been deleted and her blog on the “Better Together” website and Facebook page removed, with a BT spokesman telling The Drum magazine that “views like this are completely unacceptable”.

So we imagine there were red faces all round when this happened just hours later.

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An alert reader notes an interesting choice of cutoff point on Reporting Scotland:

(From Friday 15 August, 11m 53s.)

The Scottish and UK press has been more and more careless about disguising its bias as the referendum nears. Almost every paper, for example, reported without question the recent “Better Together” press release about being “inundated” with small donations after the first TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling.

Normally headlines would put the statement – which was completely unsubstantiated by the slightest scrap of evidence – inside quote marks or accompanied by qualifiers like “No camp claims”, but instead it was almost universally presented as fact.

“Better Together inundated with cash after debate” (The Guardian)

“Flood of donations sees Better Together hit campaign limit” (Daily Express)

“The official pro-UK campaign has publicly called for Scots to stop giving it money after a flurry of donations following Alex Salmond’s TV debate defeat.” (The Telegraph, slipping a sneaky wee bit of editorialising in too)

Calling for people to stop sending money was nothing more than a moderately clever PR stunt – the official No campaign already has more cash from millionaire Tory donors than it’s actually allowed to spend by September 18th, so there’s little point in continuing to accumulate it – but the papers obediently played along anyway.

The donations story, though, was essentially a piece of trivia. A much more serious matter was the Bank of England’s inflation report yesterday, and the embellishment and exaggeration applied to it by certain outlets revealed a great deal about publications which still officially claim to be neutral.

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