Wings Over Scotland

This morning’s papers are already full of reports about the contents of the Strathclyde Commission report, the Conservative counterpart to Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals. Embarrassingly for Johann Lamont, it looks as though the Tories are going to “outbid” Labour, the self-proclaimed “party of devolution”, with what are superficially greater powers for the Scottish Parliament on taxation.

And like much of the media’s coverage of the entire independence debate, the reporting to date is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. An actual letter from America
A fresh perspective on NATO and nukes.

2. The news less fit to print
The media tries to pretend there isn’t a blue whale in the room.

3. Unrestricted warfare
Just your standard No camp make-people-think-their-child-will-die stuff.

4. A day of shame
On which we learned that 10% = 30% and 4 = 1.

5. Friends and enemies
Anas Sarwar claims the BNP and Britain First for team-mates.

This week’s theme: spin so intense it alters gravity.

We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.

(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)

Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.

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We spend a lot of time on this site pulling the Scottish media up on its many and abysmal failings, so it’s only fair that when it occasionally gets something (largely) right we should offer it a little bit of praise and recognition.

And for once we’re not even being sarcastic when we say that, so let’s have a round of only slightly muted applause for this week’s Scottish Sun.

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We don’t have the faintest idea what effect (if any) the Tory-millionaire-run “Vote No Borders” campaign might be having on the general public, but for those of us analysing the referendum campaign it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Whether it’s the extremely suspicious nature of its funding, its employees airbrushing their CVs to remove any mention of ever working for it or the unashamedly blatant misinformation it’s been pumping out remorselessly over a wide range of subjects, it looks increasingly like a very expensive attempt to make “Better Together” appear moderate, reasonable and likeable by comparison.

Last night, in response to a media furore ignited by Wings Over Scotland’s revelation that it had pulled a cinema ad about the NHS after angry complaints from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the group finally published an extraordinary, sour and petulant official statement about the incident. As far as apologies go, we think it’s fair to say it leaves something to be desired.

It’s well worth a breakdown.

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The week-long media frenzy that would have surrounded the Scottish Government releasing a key set of figures about independence, only to have them immediately and pointedly disowned by their cited sources as gross distortions misrepresenting the reality by a factor of 12, doesn’t bear thinking about.

(Remind yourself of the 10 desperate days they dragged out of some spectacularly innocuous comments about Vladimir Putin and multiply that by about a thousand.)

The one-sided national embarrassment that is the Scottish media, however, has done its level best to completely bury the wholly-justified anger of Professors Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Robert Young of Western Ontario University.

Neither of the country’s current-affairs TV shows gave the matter more than the most cursory passing mention, nor did most of its newspapers. You’ll search in vain for a story about it in the Guardian, and the Scotsman actually managed to hide its two paragraphs of coverage deep inside pieces attacking the SNP.

A promised interview with Professor Dunleavy on “Good Morning Scotland” never materialised, but the distinguished academic DID eventually surface on Wednesday’s edition of “Newsdrive”. If you click the image above you can listen to the seven-minute slot in its entirety, and wonder just how outrageously the defenders of the Union would have to act to make the front pages of a Scottish newspaper.

Why would an Englishman vote for Scottish independence? Why would a whole group of English people vote Yes? It’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and which the group I helped to co-found last week, “English Scots for Yes”, intends to answer.

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From today’s Guardian:

“Labour cannot afford to undo the coalition’s cuts in the next government and must expect to be unpopular, one of the party’s most senior finance spokesmen will say on Friday.

Chris Leslie, the shadow chief secretary to the treasury, will say some of the spending decisions ‘will be the toughest faced by an incoming Labour government for a generation’ if Ed Miliband wins the next election.

‘We won’t be able to undo the cuts that have been felt in recent years, and I know that this will be disappointing for many people. A more limited pot of money will have to be spent on a smaller number of priorities. Lower priorities will get less.'”

And as well as being bad news for the whole UK, we already know what that means for Scotland too. Because Labour has openly said, over and over, what its plans are.

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I’m Will McLeod and I’m the Government and World Affairs Correspondent for Netroots Radio in Washington, DC. I’ve been following the Scottish independence referendum for a few years now. Most of the fallacious arguments I’ve seen have been pretty well knocked down, but there’s one in particular that keeps cropping up which is absolutely ridiculous and needs to be dealt with.

I also do policy work for various people, and since no other foreign policy and government policy geeks have knocked down the NATO argument and the defense spending argument, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring.

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Alert readers may have spotted that the “Vote No Borders” cinema advert featured on this much-viewed Wings article from a few days ago can no longer be played from the campaign group’s YouTube page, returning a “Private” error.

An even more alert reader, however, had already made a copy.

And while the entire series of ads has now been effectively banned by all of Scotland’s cinema chains, all the other ones are still present on the website while the NHS one (described as “a light-hearted sketch”) has vanished. And now we’ve found out why.

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Here’s an important statistic: almost 40% of people who look at an online article don’t get beyond the headline and strapline. More and more readers fall away the further down the article you get – by the time you’re just a few hundred words in, you’ve probably lost roughly 70% of people who started reading.

So we’re going to try to keep this really short.

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This is an extract from a mailshot being sent out by “Better Together” this week, featuring a letter allegedly penned by “Sophie”, a 19-year-old student who – like all of the No camp’s definitely authentic grassroots real Scots of all ages who’ve written such letters for it – speaks in a manner uncannily similar to that of Alistair Darling.

(It’s how all the cool teens talk these days, don’t you know?)

Wait a minute – “walking away from membership of the EU”? We just can’t keep up.

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