Wings Over Scotland

[EDIT 24 August 2016: This article has now been updated here.]

It’s Sunday, so there is of course one last convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles in all the papers, as every Unionist hack and pundit in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

Everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how Scottish revenue this year being 1% lower than it was last year has comprehensively demolished a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So before everyone moves on to a new “SCOTLAND BAD” next week, we thought it was worth a short recap of what we’ve learned about a devolved Scotland’s financial books this week.

Because for all the complex arguments, mad comedy graphs ludicrously pretending that Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and bewildering arrays of incomprehensible stats, there are only five things you really need to know about GERS.

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Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.

While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.

And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.

So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.

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Good luck with this one, folks:

All clear now?

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Depending on which parts of the media you were reading yesterday and this morning, the economic case for independence was either “shattered” (the Herald), “demolished” (the Spectator), “shredded” (Daily Record), “smashed to smithereens” (Willie Rennie, bless) or any number of other apocalyptic metaphors for total destruction, by a 1% fall in Scottish revenues resulting from a steep drop in oil prices which led to a notional Scottish budget deficit that by some measures was as high as 10% of GDP.

We must assume, then, that the economic case for the UK being an independent nation was rendered unto ruins in 2009-10, when its deficit exceeded 11% of GDP.

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The BBC’s Brian Taylor on GERS:

As we have, of course, noted before.

Economics: The art of explaining why all of your models fail to accurately predict either the future or the past.

It’s the time of year again when everyone glances at the first page of a dense booklet of complex economic data and immediately starts using it to make wild forecasts and proclamations despite the long-known problems with doing so.

So it’s also, once again, time to try looking a little further to tease out some details that others might have – let’s be generous here – accidentally missed.

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This year’s GERS figures will be published today, purporting to illustrate the financial relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK. With oil revenues down, they’ll undoubtedly provoke an orgasmic explosion of glee among Unionists crowing about “black holes” and how Scotland is too wee, too poor and too stupid to survive alone.

We’ve already run an extremely detailed explanation of all the flaws and booby-traps in GERS, but of course we’re a pro-independence website and we would say that. So instead we’ll direct you to someone who’s very much NOT on our side.

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This week Scottish Labour have been attacking the SNP’s rather timid plans for the reform of Council Tax, which is an entirely fair and legitimate opposition pursuit.

But as is their wont, Kezia Dugdale’s branch office just can’t help overplaying their hand and doing it in a highly dishonest way.

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An alert reader just found this. It’s quite something.

We especially liked this bit:

“The growing practice of the socialist government is to take decisions vitally affecting Scotland in Whitehall… this is a process which we have every intention of setting in direct reverse.”

(1m 46s)

As we’ve explored many times on Wings, one of the many reasons you should never trust a newspaper’s headline is that even the ones that are technically true can be painting a highly (and deliberately) misleading picture.

For example, more than two years ago we pointed to a Scotsman story that blared “A THIRD OF SCOTS WOULD BACK EXIT FROM EU”, which is a rather curious spin to put on a poll which found a 13-point margin for staying in the EU.

A paper particularly fond of misusing stats in this way is the Daily Mail.

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A little snippet from a corner of today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday.