Wings Over Scotland

Britain and Scotland’s journalists have set a high bar for stupid today, but this might take the biscuit. Almost every half-cut hack and so-called expert who talks about the currency options open to Scotland casually mentions that Scotland “could join the Euro”. Whether such people are doing so through ignorance of the rules of the Eurozone or through malicious intent is for observers to decide, but either way, this particular piece of witless misinformation just will not go away.

So, let’s make it nice and easy for all the lazy people who can’t be bothered Googling “Eurozone Convergence Criteria”, shall we?

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It would do our blood pressure no good at all to analyse in detail the extraordinary parade of dishonesty and naked bias that made up last night’s edition of Newsnight Scotland (RIP pending). Instead, we’ll just show you these two super-short clips of one of the show’s “expert” guest analysts, former Labour spin doctor John McTernan.

Here he is last night:

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We’ve speculated on a few occasions recently on the effect on Scottish public opinion of almost the entire Scottish media being owned and controlled from outside Scotland. So we thought it was time we actually put some facts and figures to it.

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This sort of thing really shouldn’t be so startling and unusual that we feel we need to preserve it for posterity, but here’s someone on a BBC current-affairs programme giving a fair and balanced analysis of Scottish politics:

Based on the BBC’s track record this section will be missing when it goes out on the iPlayer, so we thought we better grab it while we could.

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Here’s the Herald today on YouGov’s latest independence polling:

“Support for independence has remained unchanged with one in three voters wanting Scotland to leave the UK, the latest poll shows. The YouGov survey put support for a Yes vote at 33%, trailing backing for No on 52%. A further 12% were undecided with the rest saying they would not vote in the referendum on September 18.

The Sun’s editions on both sides of the border today go in heavy with the results of a YouGov poll showing a dramatic turnaround in the percentage of English (and Welsh) people who want Scotland to leave the UK.

Or at least, SOME of the results.

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We were a little perplexed this morning by the Daily Record’s banner headline.

And not just because of the unusually generous use by the Labour-supporting paper of the term “SNP Government” (rather than “Scottish Goverment”) on a good-news story.

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It’s not as if the Financial Times doesn’t have history with dropping great big payloads of high explosive into the middle of the independence debate late on a Sunday night. But a piece coming up in Monday’s edition (and online tonight) is going to choke a few breakfasts in London tomorrow morning.

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While we struggle through a tax return and our intrepid spotters document the second half of Better Together’s Big Train-Station Day Out, we figured you might like to read the Scottish Daily Mail’s story on the operation.

It’s a strange piece, opening with a dramatic “evil cybernat spies under the bed” headline and an opening paragraph about “sinister twists” and how we’re a “notorious abusive blog”, but then the remainder of the text twice repeats the point that we asked spotters not to harass anyone and that we’re merely challenging BT’s untruths.

It’s like their heart just wasn’t in the smear anymore.

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The Guardian tonight reports, by way of covering Johann Lamont’s debacle at First Minister’s Questions today, an interesting snippet related to our post of earlier today:

“The pro-UK Better Together campaign announced that it was to distribute half a million leaflets at railway stations, homes and high streets in Scotland this weekend with the single word “goodbye” on its front page, the O letters replaced by pound coins.”

Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?

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As this site tends to focus mainly on the output of serious newspapers we haven’t previously spent a great deal of time scrutinising the Scottish Daily Mail, and we can only surmise that it’s upset them, because they seem to have been trying very hard this month to get our attention.

We must confess, it’s now become something of an addiction.

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When studying the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, in truth one is spoiled for choice when considering the Scottish Daily Mail’s ongoing hate campaign against so-called “cybernats”.

It seems fair to say that the paper has blithely ignored Article 2, “A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for”, for example.

Articles 3 (i) (“Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications”) and 3 (iii) (“It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent”) also seem to have been somewhat cavalierly treated.

So we pretty much just stuck a pin in at random.

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