Wings Over Scotland

Our ever-alert readers will almost certainly recall – for it was only four days ago – this piece, in which we noted the Scottish media’s curious reluctance to cover what looked like a pretty blockbusting story.

Professor Sir Donald Mackay of the pro-devolution think tank Reform Scotland, an extremely distinguished businessman and adviser to the UK government, wrote a stinging article for the Sunday Times rubbishing the Office for Budget Responsibility’s gloomy forecasts for North Sea oil revenue in the coming decades, and suggesting that the real figures were likely to be over £8 billion a year higher.

Despite the enormous effect such a sum would have on the economy of an independent Scotland – wiping out the highest estimate of its deficit at a stroke and leaving it with an annual surplus of hundreds of millions of pounds – the rest of the media uncharacteristically didn’t swipe the ST’s story for their Monday editions.

But then the OBR issued a new forecast.

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Channel 4 has now aired its Dispatches programme about “intimidation”, in which a lot of grown adults from the cut-throat world of business whined about possible vague hints they may or may not have picked up that the Scottish Government would rather they kept quiet about independence.

The estimable Lallands Peat Worrier skewers the subject brilliantly here, so we shan’t detain ourselves further with the specifics – other than to passingly note that as Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine tweeted during the show, one of the alleged victims was so frightened and cowed into submission that he’s currently suing the Scottish Government at the European Court about something else entirely.

But there was something else that had us puzzled.

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Most people only read one daily newspaper, if that. We, for our sins, read almost all of them, and if you do that you learn stuff that other people don’t know.

Firstly, you spot how many agency stories pop up in multiple papers, repeated almost or actually identical, word-for-word. (Though it can also be fascinating to see which paragraphs sometimes get left out.) And secondly, you find out how many stories aren’t the result of journalism, but of one paper’s hack reading something in another paper the day before, lifting the quotes and presenting it to readers as their own story.

(Occasionally they’ll deign to credit the original source, eg “such-and-such made the comments in the Guardian yesterday”, but more often they won’t bother, and will just write “said in an interview” or similar.)

And as with the agency pieces, it’s interesting to note which stories DON’T get stolen.

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The thinktank Reform Scotland is no mouthpiece for the Yes campaign. Wikipedia notes that it’s “a sister organisation to the London-based right-wing, free market think tank Reform”, and in fact it’s closely involved with the forgotten “Devo Plus” campaign group created by politicians from the Unionist parties. Devo Plus itself is endorsed by “Better Together”, to the extent that BT celebrated DP’s birthday last year.

So we were pretty interested when Reform Scotland board member Professor Sir Donald Mackay appeared in today’s Sunday Times rubbishing the UK government’s pessimistic projections for an independent Scotland’s oil revenues, and suggesting that in fact a more realistic figure was more than TWICE the one being claimed by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

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Today’s Scottish Daily Express:

We’ve added the red lines.

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Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)

The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.

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Most newspapers have a story today about the resignation of Labour parliamentary candidate Kathy Wiles after her long history of abusive and offensive comments on social media was exposed on this site on Monday and Tuesday.

The BBC, STV, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, Express, Times, Courier and most others all report the story to varying degrees of accuracy, and most of the pieces are all but identical, featuring the same quotes. (Only the Telegraph declines to mention it, perhaps out of embarrassment over this unfortunately-timed, one-sided Alan Cochrane rant about “cybernats” on the same day Ms Wiles caught everyone’s attention.)

As the local paper of the would-be MP for Angus the Courier’s coverage is the best, with not only the standard resignation story but also a slightly deeper delve into her lengthy record of nasty postings and an editorial leader column, which is the only place we’ve seen raise the more important question arising from the incident.

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There’s some very strange counting going on in the Times today. Firstly the paper carries a story about a survey of potential shale gas deposits in the central belt, and arrives at a very gloomy conclusion (“Modest deposits shake hope of shale bonanza”):

“Scotland has a modest amount of shale gas and oil reserves but far less than are believed to be in the north of England, a new report has revealed.

The official British Geological Survey (BGS) analysis estimates that there are six billion barrels of oil and 80 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of shale gas across the central belt of Scotland which includes Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The potential shale gas reserves are a fraction of what scientists have said are in the Bowland area of northern England where it is estimated that 1,300tcf of gas exists beneath the ground. The UK already uses 3 tcf of gas every year.”

Hold on a minute. We’re not fans of fracking, but 80 trillion cubic feet? If the UK uses 3 tcf of gas a year, presumably Scotland, with 8.4% of the population, uses roughly 0.25 tcf a year. 80 tcf into 0.25 tcf suggests that the shale gas thought to be in the central belt would cover Scotland’s use for 320 years, which seems quite a lot.

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One of the features of the independence debate as covered by the Scottish and UK media has been the casual lie. We’re not talking about screaming banner front-page headlines here, but the passing, offhand untruths slipped into articles that are primarily about something else, or tiny little corner-of-a-page pieces so trivial that readers absorb the falsehood in seconds and move on.

We covered a good example of the latter last week, and it’s repeated in this morning’s Times, in a piece which makes the flatly and diametrically untrue assertion that “experts” have “produced figures suggesting that the final cost [of setting up an independent Scotland] could be £1.5 billion”, when the reality is that the only expert who has produced figures has explicitly rubbished that number.

But it’s another article in the same paper that made us smile wryly.

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It seems somehow fitting that there was a political battle in Stirling yesterday. The city was host to two sets of military-themed festivities, with the UK government having decided to hold Armed Forces Day there in a move transparently aimed at wrecking the commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn.

The anniversary was obviously on an immovable date and location, but the Labour-Tory coalition that runs Stirling Council, and which last year attempted to replace a Saltire which flies over the statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce with a Union Jack – a plan it abandoned after it was highlighted by this site – agreed to host the competing festival on the same weekend.

Armed Forces Day had free admission to undermine the relatively pricey Bannockburn event. Labour even went so far as to actively try to put people off attending the latter, with Glasgow MP Ian Davidson suggesting that the commemoration was nothing more than a glorification of “the murder of hundreds of thousands of English people”. (These particular “people” being an invading army, actual English casualties around 10,000.)

The press covered the subsequent downsizing of the historical recreation with glee, with numerous articles reporting low ticket sales and other problems right up to the eve of the show, which appeared about to be a major flop.

But then something odd happened.

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You might be able to find fault with the Scottish tabloid media’s honesty, readers, but you can’t criticise its brevity. Take this page 2 piece from this morning’s Daily Record.

Just a few dozen words squeezed into five short sentences. Let’s see how many lies the Record’s unnamed reporter manages to get across in them.

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Sorry, readers, we’re getting addicted to these.

“Better Together” spokesman, 27 September 2013:

“David Cameron does not have a vote in this referendum. Alistair Darling does. He is ready to debate Alex Salmond any time and any place.”

Letter from Danny Alexander MP to Alex Salmond, 30 Jan 2014:

“Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, has said he is willing to debate with you, as leader of the pro-independence campaign, anytime, anywhere.”

The Herald, 25 June 2014:

“Better Together, the pro-UK campaign led by Mr Darling, reacted angrily after STV indicated it was willing to change the date at the request of the First Minister. A senior Better Together source said Mr Darling would take part on July 16, as agreed, but not at a later time to suit Mr Salmond.”

(Our emphases in all cases.)

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