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?
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.
Despite the strikingly unequivocal nature of David Trimble’s clarification yesterday of his comments about the independence referendum’s potential impact on Northern Irish politics, remarkably the media are today still trying to spin them into a dire warning about a Yes vote causing renewed violence in the province.
The picture below is a page from this morning’s Sunday Times.
BBC Northern Ireland website, 2 May 2014:
Lord Trimble on “Good Morning Scotland”, 3 May 2014 (31m 30s):
Whoops, eh? Oddly, while the original story is still on the BBC NI website, we can’t seem to find one reporting the correction anywhere, even though Lord Trimble spoke to GMS more than eight hours ago. We’re sure it’ll be along any minute now.
Because this is how a state broadcaster does balanced, impartial reporting.
Now some revision notes to help you.
Just magnificent work from the Daily Mail today.
Really only a couple of tiny quibbles.
The Scottish independence debate is characterised by so many gigantic lies from the No camp and the media (no pound, international outcast, bankrupt, cataclysm, etc etc) that there’s rarely time to pick up on all the small, casual, offhand ones that also litter the news-stands and the airwaves and poison any hope of intelligent discourse.
So let’s make an effort with one, just by way of example.
Can we please buy the Telegraph a new picture to depict “Scottish people”?
Alert readers will be familiar with a phenomenon we often like to highlight in these pages – that of the dramatic newspaper headline which rapidly turns into something completely different by the time you read the text of the story.
There’s an especially fine example in today’s Telegraph.
We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.
But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.
… they think you are.
(UK edition on the left, Scottish edition on the right.)
The Scottish media displays such a remarkable uniformity of thought when it comes to the independence debate that you’d think it’d be the easiest thing in the world for them to at least all get their story straight when they launch a smear campaign against a prominent Yes figure.
That, however, would presuppose that they weren’t also incompetent.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
