Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers of The National will have noticed an article by me in it today. It reads slightly weirdly, jumping from subject to subject, because it was originally done as an interview but they then decided to cut the questions out to get more text in.

That’s all absolutely fine – they okayed it with me first – but some readers may be interested in seeing the full original piece, which is about twice as long. If you are, you can read it below. If you’re not, um, do what you like. I’m not your mum.

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Nobody else is going to do this, so we’ll do it ourselves.

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All five of the opinion pollsters who regularly poll on Scottish politics (Panelbase, YouGov, TNS, Ipsos Mori and Survation) have now published surveys in the past two weeks asking the independence question. So it seems reasonable to expect there’ll be no more polls before the anniversary of the referendum on Friday.

Given the conventional wisdom that the economy, underpinned by that pesky volatile oil, was the main reason not enough Scots could be persuaded to take the leap into self-government, readers might expect that the dramatic collapse in the oil price since last year (when we checked today it was trading at just over $47 a barrel, less than half the $97 it was at the start of September 2014) would only have cemented voters’ feeling that they made the right decision.

So why is the opposite true?

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There’s been a veritable flurry of polls commissioned to mark the impending one-year anniversary of the independence referendum. In the last 48 hours alone we’ve seen ones from Survation, YouGov and Panelbase, making a variety of interesting findings. As ever, though, the trick is in the interpretation.

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Comedy buffoon Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph:

Actual donations received: No campaign £4.3 million, Yes campaign £2.8 million.

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This happened last night:

Despite having only raised £5,470 of its £50,000 target, the fundraiser set up by a veteran Lib Dem activist (or, in BBC language, an “Aberdeen woman”) was suddenly closed down, with no explanation offered.

So what do we know?

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To be honest, readers, this site isn’t very bothered about a bit of rudeness in politics. The sainted Aneurin Bevan, father of the NHS, once famously called the Tories “lower than vermin”, and his contemporary opponent Winston Churchill wasn’t averse to a few strong words either.

So long as nobody’s inciting violence, it’s our view that adults should be allowed to express dislike of each other in whatever terms they choose – at the end of the day, words are just sounds, and it’s absurdly irrational for a civilised species to arbitrarily pretend to take offence at the sounds “uck” or “unt” but not the sounds “urp” or “erk”.

So we’re not too fussed if dim-witted and boorish Conservative councillor Gordon McCaskill would “like to see” ISIS fanatics rape, behead or blow up Nicola Sturgeon. Unless he actively encourages or assists them to do it, he can think and say whatever he likes. That’s what free speech in a free country is supposed to be about. You don’t need to like something to defend it, as we demonstrated last week.

But our job is to monitor the media and the comical double standards thereof, and in particular the BBC, which is funded by taxpayers and which (unlike newspapers and other broadcasters) is supposed to be bound by law to impartiality and fairness.

And in the case of Cllr McCaskill, the leader of the Conservative group on East Renfrewshire Council who’s now been suspended by the Scottish Tories pending an investigation over his comments on Twitter on Monday, we suspect that alert readers won’t be entirely surprised by what we’ve observed.

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We can’t help wondering if the Church Of England’s “Daily Prayer” this morning was chosen while looking north towards a certain Scottish Lib Dem MP in his time of trial.

If such things are your inclination, readers, pray for Alistair.

A serial offender.

We’re sure Ruth Davidson will act with her usual decisive swiftness.

We’re watching the Alistair Carmichael court hearing today. It’s monumentally boring, and likely to go on for much of today and tomorrow.

If you want to see for yourself it’s being broadcast on STV, BBC and Indy Live. But we really, really don’t advise it.

Summer is, as we’ve said before, the “silly season” for politics. Wings readers will have noticed that like everywhere else, we’ve been rather lighter on content than usual for the last three months as politicians celebrated their general election victories by giving themselves long holidays – sorry, “time for constituency work” – and in the absence of a referendum campaign to fill the gap there wasn’t much going on.

So we can’t blame the media for raking over old ground in search of anything to fill threadbare column inches with. But it’s less excusable when the things they choose to reheat, repackage and reissue are ancient, endlessly-disproven lies.

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