Wings Over Scotland

On the day of the march and rally for independence in Edinburgh last month, the BBC’s coverage was token to the point of openly contemptuous. As 20,000 people marched through the nation’s capital to hear the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and others speak in public, the state broadcaster grudgingly provided a few seconds of footage of the march on Reporting Scotland, and then bizarrely gave equal airtime to the “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall and a suspiciously staged-looking leafleting of four or five people by the No camp.

It struck us as weird at the time, and the episode of Reporting Scotland in question curiously never found its way onto the iPlayer, unlike every other one.

And then tonight it happened again.

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We forget who, but someone we read this week – in the Herald, we think – referenced a line spoken by Jennifer Aniston’s character in an old episode of Friends (which we’ve managed to identify as S02E01, “The One With Ross’s New Girlfriend”):

“When I saw him get off that plane with her, I really thought I just hit rock bottom. But today, it’s like there’s rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me.”

We were put in mind of it by something in this afternoon’s Guardian.

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The following stories all come from a single day’s edition of a single British newspaper – the Independent’s issue dated 16 October 2013. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

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Alert readers will have noticed that the mainstream press has been rummaging through its Greatest Nat-Bashing Hits again over recent days, trying to flog one last turn around the track out of the year-old “EU advice” story. The Herald, Telegraph, Express and others have all dredged it up again to excoriate the Scottish Government for “wasting” just over £19,000 (or in newspaper arithmetic, “£20,000”) trying to uphold the principle of law officers being able to give advice in confidentiality.

But wait a minute – when this story first did the rounds, wasn’t it a lot more?

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This is the front page lead story from today’s Sunday Post:

There’s a curious line there. Can you spot it?

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We must confess, we’ve never quite understood the No campaign’s longing to turn the independence referendum into one on Alex Salmond. The First Minister certainly divides opinion, but his personal ratings are consistently more impressive (and by a considerable distance) than poll figures for Yes.

The latest one we could find (from a month ago) suggests that if the referendum question was “Do you want to entrust Scotland’s future to Alex Salmond?”, the Yes side would win by an 11% margin on an 85% turnout.

So it makes stuff like this, from today’s Sunday Herald, all the more puzzling.

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From another ridiculous, barrel-scraping right-wing tabloid piece today:

“Another song pays tribute to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, while All Jock Tamson’s Bairns are Coming Home, by Steven Clark, welcomes refugees from “Iraq, Zimbabwe, Turkey and Somalia”.

Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman Mary Scanlon said: ‘The SNP is abusing the education system to promote its own separation propaganda.'”

Welcoming refugees from all corners of the globe, while simultaneously promoting “separatism”? Is it just us, or is there maybe a wee bit of a logical contradiction there?

The stench of panic from the No camp is getting overwhelming.

Below is an extract from an article published in the US quarterly Dissent Magazine, entitled “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark”.

We tweeted a link to it yesterday but dismayingly nobody seemed to notice it (not a single retweet last time we looked), and it really deserves reading. It’s an aspect of Nordic social democracy and gender equality that you don’t hear much about.

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We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland ahead of tonight’s episode. Now that we have, we rather wish we’d heeded this advice from the PS3 iPlayer.

It’s like it knew.

This, chums, is what the Daily Telegraph thinks of as “a house”:

The article appears to go on to suggest that house prices in England would rocket as a result of a Yes vote, while those in Scotland would plummet. We’re not quite sure that the average Scottish voter will reach the same conclusion from that assertion that the Telegraph would want them to.

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It’s not directly related to Scottish independence, but we were disturbed to be alerted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray to a piece of recent BBC coverage. A friend of ours has helpfully cut down the video footage in question to just the important parts, and saved it in case of sudden disappearances. You should probably watch them.

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.