So this isn’t true, any more than it was when Labour first promised it 22 years ago.
But the sheer number of ways in which it’s a lie is quite the thing.
We were having an idle browse on Google Play Books this morning for some bargain holiday reading when we happened upon a startling new cover for Chris Mullin’s 1982 classic A Very British Coup.
We found ourselves thinking “rise to what, exactly?”
And as it happened, we had some new Panelbase polling data on that.
The prissy, easily-upset and extravagantly-funded Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton tweeted this this morning:
Now, we’re not sure “you’ve had the government you’ve voted for about half the time in a two-horse race” would be all that great a selling point in the first place, but shall we see if it’s actually true, readers?
Our poll story yesterday was a pretty interesting piece of politics news considering it’s the Christmas dead season. We put an interesting new angle on the independence question, and posted all the poll data so that reporters had plenty to get their teeth into. And we released it at lunchtime so they had plenty of time to get it into today’s editions.
Remarkably, though, none of the Scottish media – with the honourable exception of The National, who made it their front page splash – thought that the best numbers for independence in many months merited even a dismissive passing mention. Scotland’s political hacks doggedly ignored it on social media. And then things got weird.
The tweet above appeared briefly – having been posted at 11.44am it was gone by no later than 12.10pm – on the Twitter account of the Herald. The story it linked to cannot be found through the paper’s website, though it’s still hidden away on the servers.
(Its sister paper the Evening Times carried the story, then outright deleted it.)
And the reason why provides a fascinating insight into how the press operates.
Now don’t get us wrong, readers. We’re sure that gormless Tory MP Ross Thomson is not, repeat NOT, permanently binned off his tulips on methamphetamine. He just has an unfortunate habit of photographing that way.
So when an alert reader sent us a link this morning to an extraordinary interview in which the Brexiteer claimed to have “killed indyref 2” in 2017, we didn’t automatically dismiss it as the drug-addled rantings of an ego-crazed madman.
Instead, we thought we’d check for signs of life.
Readers, meet Eric Simpson.
He’s a fervent Tory, and the Secretary of Inverurie Community Council. He tweets as “ElginLoon59”, and as a busy pillar of the local community he’s got some pretty firm views on the sort of people who should and shouldn’t hold public office.
Yesterday we brought you news of the Scottish Mail On Sunday’s deep concern that the new Scottish budget might cost wealthy old people cashing in a £600,000 pension pot as one lump sum as much as £3,000 in extra tax. It was a heart-rending tale, but today we have one even more harrowing.
That’s our old Scotland In Union pal Merryn Somerset Webb writing in “the UK’s best-selling financial magazine” Money Week, and she was furious.
The Scottish press and opposition have had it in for the baby box ever since the idea was mooted, but this is a pretty spectacular new low in barrel-scraping.
“Almost half”, eh? How many are we talking about exactly?
This week’s Scottish budget threw the opposition parties and the media into panic and disarray. Evidently having expected considerably more swingeing tax hikes than the extremely modest increases that were imposed on higher earners, they’d built up a head of steaming fury that had nowhere to go, and have been reduced to frantically scrabbling around for extreme (or flat-out wrong) examples to try to generate outrage.
Today’s politics lead in the Scottish Mail On Sunday is a case in point.
By going through all the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, the SMoS has managed to pick out a tiny anomaly around National Insurance thresholds, and portrayed it as hitting people on a very healthy but not exactly super-rich salary of £45,000 with a total tax-and-NI rate of 53%.
The small print, as ever, is rather less dramatic.
Because to tell you the truth, readers, we’re not sure the word “idiot” is accurate any more. The tweets you’re about to read are far beyond simple stupidity and well into the shadowy realms of deliberate falsehood. (Delivered in the secure knowledge that the media won’t challenge it, and in fact will probably exaggerate and amplify it further.)
So let’s start with one of the better-known dum-dums.
That’s serial bonehead Jamie Greene there, demonstrating that he can’t count up to two, because what he evidently meant to write was “two pictures say eleven words”.
This should be good.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
