Wings Over Scotland

It’s been fascinating to watch the media slyly turning Chris and Colin Weir’s quite understandable objection to being defamed by loathsome right-wing newspapers and MSPs into an attack on “cybernats”.

But this morning Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph – who we rarely read even for laughs now, so far gone is his grasp on reality – added a particularly deft twist which we thought worthy of note for those who like to study how the press does its business.

And yes, we entirely meant that double entendre.

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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With crushing predictability, the Scotsman today ran a “vile cybernats” story based around last week’s big thing, the fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” campaign group. Weaker even than the usual efforts, this one simply reported the group’s claims at face value, not bothering with so much as a single example of the alleged abusive posts.

“A campaign group launched last week in support of a No vote in the referendum says it has suffered a “virulent and nasty attack” from Nationalists since going public.

The Vote No Borders campaign has been forced to block comments from being left on its website, as a result of the onslaught.”

But while tidying up some tabs tonight, we happened to notice that we still had a VNB page open, with the first day’s comments intact. Just how bad were they?

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This article from yesterday hasn’t made it onto the Daily Record’s website. When people told us about it, we thought they were joking. When someone typed the text out by hand and emailed it to us, we thought they were making it up. We had to get someone to scan the page for us before we believed it was real.

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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Anyone who really wanted to know the score when it came to pensions was already aware of the facts. For well over a year, the DWP has been telling people who asked that they would continue to receive their UK state pension regardless of the outcome of the referendum. So that’s reassuring.

But for some unfathomable and mysterious reason, the explanation for which defies all known science, that information hasn’t really made it into the independence debate. “Better Together” has felt absolutely free to continue scaremongering about it, with Alistair Darling saying as recently as last month “On the subject of pensions, what happens with separation? Nobody knows – certainly not the Scottish Government.”

So we were a little surprised last night when a piece in the Scotsman broke ranks.

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One of the most insidious aspects of the Unionist and media attack on independence is the constant refrain of “Scotland will be poorer after independence, so there will have to be cuts to services or tax increases. Cuts or tax rises. Cuts or tax rises. If you vote Yes, do you want CUTS OR TAX RISES?”

Of late, it’s often been used as a corollary of a new plea: “Oh, it’s not that we’re against independence, but why won’t Alex Salmond admit that there will be downsides? Why won’t he be honest about the risks and challenges? If only he’d admit that it won’t be a land of milk and honey we might listen.”

While its prevalence is new, the actual line is a tired old straw man – neither the First Minister nor the wider Yes campaign has EVER pretended Scotland would suddenly enter a fairytale utopia where everything was perfect and cash flowed from taps.

But for the avoidance of doubt, as advocates of a Yes vote, let’s put something on the record in black and white: There Will Be Cuts.

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Yesterday the BBC finally changed the headline and body text of its story about Lord Trimble’s comments on the impact of a Yes vote on Northern Irish politics, three days after the original and two days after the peer himself told BBC Radio Scotland that it totally misrepresented his views.

Better late than never. But there’s still something not quite right in the image above, and you’ll have to be one of our extra-specially alert readers to spot it.

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Readers will know that as a rule we don’t just pinch bits of other peoples’ work wholesale, but in this particular case, given that the entire UK media’s been going on about it misleadingly for a solid week and still shows no sign of stopping, it seemed only fair that everyone should be up to speed on the source.

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We haven’t had an “And Finally” in days. Let’s have one.

(No, it’s not a spoof.)

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To cheer you up a bit, we thought you might like to see a couple of rather curious pieces from this weekend’s right-wing press. 300 years of the Union have infamously left Scotland with the lowest life expectancies in the UK, as illustrated in particularly stark fashion by some maps published a couple of years ago in the Guardian:

But what can be done about it?

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Respectable author Allan Massie (father of Spectator columnist Alex) rather shames himself in today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday, with a particularly grim piece of what we assume is supposed to be comical crystal ball-gazing, painting a melodramatic picture of an apocalyptic post-independence Scotland as seen by Project Fear.

Over 2500 words long, it ticks all the boxes – no currency union, a mass exodus of business, Spain vetoing Scotland’s EU membership, economic Armageddon forcing the return of tuition fees and prescription charges, Trident staying on the Clyde permanently, Orkney and Shetland voting to stay with the UK and somehow taking the oil with them in direct contravention of all international law, and so on.

Which would all be a super piece of knockabout fun, were it not for the fact that we’ve already almost lost count of the number of times the right-wing English media, and in particular the Mail itself, has already trotted out this same dystopian drivel.

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