We thought this deserved a wider audience after the Herald’s appalling front-page lead scare story today by Michael Settle and Kate Devlin, channelling Jim Murphy MP:
“SCOTTISH POLICE FEDERATION
5 Woodside Place, Glasgow, G3 7QFTo: News Editor
Date: 1 September 2014
Subject: Independence Referendum
Oooft. ‘Nuff said.
The Daily Record, 27 Aug 2014:
And Mr Brown again in the Observer, 31 August 2014:
They want to cut corporation tax by 3p in the pound. That’s less for health and pensions, not more.”
Veteran readers will know where we’re going next.
Last week, Yes voters only hated their families, not Scotland.
This week it’s both. Can you feel the fear, readers?
Wings Over Scotland officially launched on the 1st of November 2011, with a collection of posts imported from a personal blog. (The first original post didn’t appear until a week later.) It was meant just to be a small aggregator site of interesting stories from the newspapers with a short bit of commentary. That month we had 6,290 pageviews.
We’ve grown a bit since then.
So worn-down are we by the job of scrutinising Scotland’s exhaustingly terrible media for three years for you, our beloved readers, that we often can’t bring ourselves to watch current-affairs shows live any more, steeling ourselves to catch up with them on iPlayer only if people say there was something of particular note on them.
We’re glad we didn’t miss this, though. Because it might be the case that no politician in human history has ever been as hopelessly, pitiably, comically out of his depth as Willie Rennie was on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland.
If you’ll forgive one of my very rare switches to the first-person view, readers, I’ve found the last few days in the independence referendum particularly weird.
That’s because my current life is curiously mirroring my previous one as a videogames journalist. The gaming community is at present mired in a convulsive orgy of the most mindboggling horror over something called “GamerGate”, which I couldn’t even begin to decribe adequately to you, because frankly you wouldn’t believe me and I’m not sure the words exist to do it justice anyway.
By way of illustration of that fact, this article on games website VG24/7 is, genuinely, by far the best, most accurate summary and analysis of the situation that I’ve read. (Twitter followers will already have seen me tweet a couple of random samples of what’s going on. I urge you, if you can, to endure the entirety of that second link, and note that it’s had almost FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND views.)
But while proving that the sort of abusive insanity pervading the world of videogames makes even the absolute worst of indyref name-calling look like two kittens with woolly hats on having a meow-off over who gets first shot at a saucer of milk, the core principles are the same – a tiny handful of total boneheads having their actions blown out of all proportion by the press in a shock-horror frenzy bearing no relation to the actual experiences of 99.9% of people.
Last week I was working in the tattoo studio and got chatting to a client on whom my colleague was completing a large, Japanese-style sleeve on his upper arm and chest. He was sitting upright in his chair, stripped to the waist, his new ink glowing.
We got talking about the referendum. Unusually, this guy was a No voter. I say ‘unusually’ because the vast majority of our clients in the studio are vocally keen Yes types. Perhaps there’s something in the inked person’s character – a bohemian or experimental quality that naturally favours thoughts of change or progression.
This guy was a very nice, friendly, middle-aged small business owner from North Lanarkshire. As a Yes voter, I try not to get too preachy on the subject in the studio simply because it wouldn’t be professional – I wouldn’t want to get into any kind of heated debate with someone I have to tattoo for hours on end.
Still, I lightly prodded him on some of the independence issues. I was curious to hear his perspective as I rarely encounter it in someone face to face.
“Bad for business”, he mumbled in an offhand way. “I just don’t like the sound of it”
This week it has been claimed that independence could leave homeowners facing a rise in mortgage rates. Strutt & Parker are a London-based high-value estate agent which proudly notes in a glossy promo video that the average sale value of the houses they market is £850,000. The company has regional Scottish branch offices in Inverness, Banchory, Perth and Edinburgh.
In a report backing “Better Together”, the firm allegedly (we can’t find the report published anywhere*) repeats a claim often made by the No campaign – that if an independent Scotland walked away from its share of the UK’s debt, interest rates would rise to the point where the average mortgage would cost an extra £5,200 a year.
The entire argument rests on it being indisputable that Scotland would end up with higher borrowing rates than the rUK, but that’s a claim that needs some scrutiny.
Earlier today we bemoaned some chump throwing an egg at Jim Murphy this week during his Shouting At Old Ladies In Shopping Centres Tour of Scotland, thereby enabling the Scottish press to enjoy an easy orgy of hypocritical “cybernat”-baiting. Murphy has unsurprisingly made the most of the incident, suspending the tour and bizarrely alleging that Yes Scotland is directly co-ordinating the abuse.
Egg-throwing is of course an act of protest rather than violence, and reactions to it tend to depend on whether you support the politics of the “victim” or not. (After all, the entire point of using an egg is that it’s fragile and breaks on impact, making a mess but doing no damage – insult rather than injury.)
This long-standing form of protest was treated as a national joke when someone did it to John Prescott – as was his actually violent reaction – and we don’t seem to remember anyone minding too much when it happened to Nick Griffin.
(For all his vileness, Griffin was a democratically elected politician just as Murphy is.)
Now, we actually have no way of knowing that this week’s culprit was a real Yes supporter rather than a stooge – it seems odd that with Murphy surrounded by so many Labour goons at every event and in a very public place, nobody managed to apprehend or photograph the assailant. But let’s apply Occam’s Razor and assume for the purposes of this piece that they were a genuine disgruntled opponent.
Because the question that then arises is “What else could they do?”
A couple of months ago we observed that Jim Murphy’s sparsely-attended tour of 100 Scottish street corners appeared to be mostly populated by Labour politicians and activists following him around multiple locations to pad out the, well, let’s call them “crowds”. It’s interesting to note that he now seems to have abandoned any pretence.
And it makes the point of the exercise a little hard to discern.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
