Wings Over Scotland

There’s not been much happening in the news today, folks, but luckily an alert reader came to the rescue with a story from the Financial Times that had slipped past us and which we have the oddest sensation the Scottish press won’t pick up either.

“Ireland’s long-term borrowing costs have fallen below those of the UK for the first time in six years in the latest sign of the remarkable turnround in the eurozone, which just two years ago seemed on the verge of break-up.”

Ireland, of course, was in a far deeper financial hole than resource-rich, wealthy Scotland could ever conceivably find itself in. Yet after just six short years it’s already seen as a safer credit risk than the UK.

We’re told that Scotland couldn’t afford to service its debt because the cost of borrowing would be too high. We’re told that a Sterling currency union couldn’t work because it would be like the disastrous Eurozone, yet the Eurozone has weathered the most extraordinary fiscal storms – again fiercer than anything the extremely similar economies of Scotland and the rUK could ever produce – and bounced right back.

But one after another, every Unionist scare story turns out to be drivel. With the UK government having already admitted this week that pensions are safe too, we’re not sure what there is left to be frightened of.

We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.

Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.

Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?

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If you’ve ever been ill, or might ever get ill, or know anyone who might ever get ill.

“In five years England will not have an NHS as you understand it, and if we vote No, in ten years neither will we.”

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The Times sells a paltry 18,155 copies a day in Scotland, and its website is locked behind the most expensive paywall of any publication that we know of, so not many people will read its Scottish stories in their original location.

Of course, we’re sure anything important would be prominently featured across the rest of the media just like yesterday’s big pensions news was, so there would be no need to reproduce the whole thing here.

Still, better safe than sorry, eh?

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We’ve never met Chris and Colin Weir, but judging by their actions alone, they’re the sort of people we should all aspire to be more like. Caring, decent and hard-working people all their lives, fate bestowed a great slice of fortune on them when they won £161m on the EuroMillions lottery in 2011.

Unlike others, they didn’t embark on an orgy of ostentatious consumption, decadence and waste. Shunning publicity, they enjoyed their windfall but also quietly got on with doing untold good for their local community, helping out their friends and family and neighbours. It’s doubtful we’ll ever know the full extent of their generosity. They’ve never sought recognition or thanks for the millions they’ve given away.

But at the very least, as a bare-minimum standard of humanity, they deserve better than to be traduced in the press by sewer-dwelling vermin like this:

The worthless fat trougher above is Alex Johnstone, a staunch defender of the bedroom tax who’s never managed to actually win an election in his own right but is nevertheless the Tory list MSP for North East Scotland, sponging off the taxpayer in the name of a democratic proportional representation that his party doggedly refuses to extend to the rest of the UK.

And what he did today is going to be the biggest test of our self-restraint in the 30 months since we started this website.

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With crushing predictability, the Scotsman today ran a “vile cybernats” story based around last week’s big thing, the fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” campaign group. Weaker even than the usual efforts, this one simply reported the group’s claims at face value, not bothering with so much as a single example of the alleged abusive posts.

“A campaign group launched last week in support of a No vote in the referendum says it has suffered a “virulent and nasty attack” from Nationalists since going public.

The Vote No Borders campaign has been forced to block comments from being left on its website, as a result of the onslaught.”

But while tidying up some tabs tonight, we happened to notice that we still had a VNB page open, with the first day’s comments intact. Just how bad were they?

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Update: the big pensions story of the day has now made it as far as the BBC. The Herald has also made its online version a bit more visible. No other media outlet, as far as we’ve spotted, has picked it up. It’ll be fascinating to see whether it gets covered on Reporting Scotland and Scotland Tonight in the next hour. [EDIT: No.]

Meanwhile, we thought you might like some more footage from the hearing.

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This article from yesterday hasn’t made it onto the Daily Record’s website. When people told us about it, we thought they were joking. When someone typed the text out by hand and emailed it to us, we thought they were making it up. We had to get someone to scan the page for us before we believed it was real.

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Just in case Alistair Darling missed it:

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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Anyone who really wanted to know the score when it came to pensions was already aware of the facts. For well over a year, the DWP has been telling people who asked that they would continue to receive their UK state pension regardless of the outcome of the referendum. So that’s reassuring.

But for some unfathomable and mysterious reason, the explanation for which defies all known science, that information hasn’t really made it into the independence debate. “Better Together” has felt absolutely free to continue scaremongering about it, with Alistair Darling saying as recently as last month “On the subject of pensions, what happens with separation? Nobody knows – certainly not the Scottish Government.”

So we were a little surprised last night when a piece in the Scotsman broke ranks.

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We can’t remember if anyone mentioned this last week when we were talking about the Scotland Office’s bizarre Buzzfeed escapades, so we’ll just put it up here now.

There’s something not quite right about that picture and the words underneath it, isn’t there, readers? Have you spotted it yet?