Wings Over Scotland

With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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The Spectator: as subtle as it is classy.

Our big story today could almost have been designed as the perfect test of the Scottish media’s professional integrity. The revelation that “Better Together” appears to have broken the law – again – by conducting an unlicensed lottery to raise funds isn’t all that dramatic in itself, though it would demonstrate an attitude entirely in keeping with the sneering, arrogant tone adopted by the No campaign in general.

The sum involved, though – £100, in the form of five copies of a £20 book offered in return for donations – does allow us to make a rather convenient comparison.

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We got slightly distracted yesterday by documenting some eye-popping Unionist madness, and completely forgot to finish our investigation into the Guardian’s odd claims that the Scottish Government had “delayed”, “softened” and “compromised” its stance on the removal of Trident from Scotland after independence, and that such a move betrayed nervousness over the feasibility of its goal of NATO membership.

We examined one piece by Severin Carrell, but the paper actually ran two by the same author on the same subject, and the second was just as inaccurate and misleading.

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You may have noticed we’ve been a bit paralysed by choice today. Bizarre idiocy from the No camp has broken out across so many different fronts at once that we couldn’t decide which one to tackle first.

Labour’s extraordinary attempt to steal the SNP’s clothes in Dunfermline? The Mail’s hilarious editorial on the “bitter attacks” of the “demoralised” Yes campaign? Alan Cochrane’s disintegrating composure and sanity? The cluelessly deranged “Braveheart and Sassenachs” wordspew from Andrew Gilligan in this morning’s Telegraph?

On reflection, the most significant is probably the increasingly noticeable shift in the tone of coverage in the Guardian, the UK newspaper with by some distance the most extensive Scottish reporting. At the weekend we highlighted a truly horrible piece of sub-Daily-Express smearmongering by the  paper’s Scottish correspondent Severin Carrell based – on its own open admission – entirely on rumours and speculation from a couple of Labour activists.

Today, the same reporter adopted a more subtle approach.

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(with apologies to the author of The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, and with thanks to Johann Lamont for the virus)  

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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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