Here’s Alistair Darling on Radio Clyde this morning, reported by STV:
You know we’re not going to let that one slide without a fact-check, don’t you?
I’d waited a long time for an official independence meeting to take place in my home town of Stonehaven, so when I read on Monday morning that Better Together (or No Thanks or SNPSNPSNPBOOO! or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) were holding just such a thing at the town hall that evening, I bounded along Allardice Street with all the enthusiasm I could muster.
Why had it taken until just five weeks before the vote to have such a meeting? I wasn’t sure. But since the Commonwealth Games I’d seen a rise in the amount of Yes signs, posters, car stickers and flags in the town. Maybe Better Together decided it was time to do something. Which side would take claim Stonehaven’s finest creation – the deep fried Mars bar – as their own?
Considering I only found out about it on the day, I thought there’d be hardly anyone there, but to my surprise the town hall was bulging with comfy chairs. Maybe two thirds were full. I felt like I was back at school as almost everybody refused to sit in the first couple of rows for fear of… well, it turned out most of these people were feart beyond belief already.
The media coverage of the first TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling was a classic, but transparent, stitch-up. A poll which had a majority Unionist sample before the debate began duly reported a “victory” for Darling, even though among the sample’s small number of undecideds most thought Salmond had won.
But that crooked measurement was enough to justify a week-long frenzy of front pages portraying the debate as a fatal disaster for the First Minister and an epic, decisive triumph for the angry former Chancellor. Inconveniently, two new polls this weekend both showing a swing to Yes and a single-figure No lead somewhat undermine that narrative, but the No campaign is nevertheless desperate to quit while it’s ahead.
An alert reader notes an interesting choice of cutoff point on Reporting Scotland:
(From Friday 15 August, 11m 53s.)
This is Conservative MSP John Scott openly lying to an audience in Ayr yesterday on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Big Debate”, on the subject of whether Scottish people would continue to have access to English hospitals (and specifically Great Ormond Street children’s hospital) in the event of independence.
The female voice correcting him is Jeane Freeman. The truth is below.
In March this year, Wings Over Scotland ran a breathtakingly successful fundraiser. We asked for £50,000 in a month and achieved it in eight hours, going on to raise over £110,000 in total, despite the bitterness and cynicism of the mainstream media.
The money has been used for various projects – we’ve already spent many thousands of pounds on site running costs, conducting opinion polls, taking out adverts and distributing hundreds of thousands of leaflets and posters and postcards and badges.
Click here to go to fundraising site.
But the main thing we wanted to fund was The Wee Blue Book – a pocket-sized guide to independence, fully-sourced and referenced and covering every important aspect of the debate, but which can be read in about an hour. We budgeted £15,000 for it, with the intention of producing perhaps 20,000 copies. But we’ve got four million voters to reach, and we need to scale that up a bit.
This is a “Better Together” graphic about pensions.
We’d like you to note what it says carefully. There’ll be a quiz in a minute.
From a leaflet sent out this week by Scotland’s only Tory MP, David Mundell:
“Do Keith and Michelle have a surname?”, nosy readers might be wondering.
The Scottish and UK press has been more and more careless about disguising its bias as the referendum nears. Almost every paper, for example, reported without question the recent “Better Together” press release about being “inundated” with small donations after the first TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling.
Normally headlines would put the statement – which was completely unsubstantiated by the slightest scrap of evidence – inside quote marks or accompanied by qualifiers like “No camp claims”, but instead it was almost universally presented as fact.
“Better Together inundated with cash after debate” (The Guardian)
“Flood of donations sees Better Together hit campaign limit” (Daily Express)
“The official pro-UK campaign has publicly called for Scots to stop giving it money after a flurry of donations following Alex Salmond’s TV debate defeat.” (The Telegraph, slipping a sneaky wee bit of editorialising in too)
Calling for people to stop sending money was nothing more than a moderately clever PR stunt – the official No campaign already has more cash from millionaire Tory donors than it’s actually allowed to spend by September 18th, so there’s little point in continuing to accumulate it – but the papers obediently played along anyway.
The donations story, though, was essentially a piece of trivia. A much more serious matter was the Bank of England’s inflation report yesterday, and the embellishment and exaggeration applied to it by certain outlets revealed a great deal about publications which still officially claim to be neutral.
With the referendum now just five weeks away and most of the polls still uncomfortably close, there’s an increasing sense of urgency and lack of subtlety about the No camp and media’s scaremongering.
Yesterday the Scottish media covered the award of a Royal Navy shipbuilding contract to BAE Systems in unequivocally political terms. “Promise of £348m shipyard contract for No vote”, blared the Scotsman, while the Scottish Sun’s front page went with “3 ships deal ‘if No vote’”. (The English edition was the rather more loquacious “Scots will land £348m Royal Navy contract – if they stay in the UK”.)
Yet the text of the articles told a radically different story.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
