From the Scotsman today:
“Without the offshore tax revenues, an independent Scotland’s public finances would be in a far worse state than are the UK’s. The better the argument that these revenues will carry on flowing, the more credible is the Yes campaign.”
Firstly, of course, the assertion fundamentally isn’t true. We know from official figures that an independent Scotland even WITHOUT oil would have a GVA of 99% of the UK average, and an independent Scotland wouldn’t have to follow UK spending plans, like blowing public cash on a vastly inflated military. But that’s not even the point.
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Category
comment, media, scottish politics
A story from Reuters tonight:
“A majority of FTSE 100 chairmen oppose Scottish independence as they fear splitting up would be bad for British business and dilute the UK’s economic influence”
Ooft. How big is this majority of the chairmen of the 100 leading companies, then?
“The poll by executive search firm Korn Ferry found 65 percent of chairmen of 32 FTSE 100 companies said it would be bad for business if – “
Woah there! 65% of 32? Isn’t that, um, 21? That’s not really a “majority” of 100, is it? And while we’re here, how many of the chairmen of FTSE 100 companies have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum anyway? We have a strong suspicion that the effective sample in this survey might actually have been zero.
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comment, media, uk politics
We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.
Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.
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Tags: arithmetic fail
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comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
From today’s Telegraph.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
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Tags: cartoons
Category
culture, media, uk politics
To save time, just take everything we said last week and repeat.
Perhaps the most telling thing, though, about this week’s edition of what now appears to be the BBC’s official late-night No-campaign propaganda slot is that Iain Martin used to be the editor of the Scotsman. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
Someone just forwarded us the results of a survey by STV’s polling arm Scotpulse. It’s a “wordcloud” of the sort we have on this very site (it’s over on the right hand side and down a bit, marked “Tags”), where the more significant something is the bigger its name gets printed. It pretty much speaks for itself.
You’re the ones who put the word out there, readers. It’s working. Thank you.
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admin, media, navel-gazing, scottish politics
We wouldn’t like to suggest Unionists are clutching at straws this week, but:
Number of words actually spoken by David Bowie about independence: 4
Number of words written about it so far by major news outlets: 3,916
To be honest we stopped counting after that.
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comment, culture, media, scottish politics
So we just got this a few minutes ago (click pic to enlarge):
And now we’re really starting to think a licence-fee avoidance campaign is a good idea.
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Category
disturbing, media, scottish politics
Another scrupulously balanced panel from the state broadcaster.
The papers-review slot is turning into quite the little regular treat.
Category
idiots, media, scottish politics, uk politics, video
As we’ve noted before, the Independent is by a large distance the most English of all the UK’s “national” newspapers. Alone among its peers, it has no Scottish edition, no Scottish news section, no Scottish editor, not even a full-time Scottish correspondent. It struggles to shift 3,000 (not a typo – THREE thousand) copies a day in Scotland.
So if we were conducting a panel debate about Scotland on a news channel, we’re not sure that the paper’s chief political commentator Steve Richards is the guy we’d call for expertise. But the BBC, bless it, has other ideas.
That notwithstanding, today’s edition of Dateline London was an interesting watch. Correspondents from the USA, China and Greece, and host Gavin Esler, offered some largely insightful comments, only occasionally interrupted by Richards butting in in a desperate attempt to get the discussion back on the standard UK-media line.
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Tags: foreigner watch
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analysis, comment, media, scottish politics, video, world
Can’t wait to read these two stories in the morning.
Goodnight, readers.
Category
media, scottish politics, wtf
