Wings Over Scotland

Today’s release of the 2013 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey results provided an interesting pair of stats. Scottish people told pollsters ScotCen that they’d favour independence by a very big margin (52% to 30%, or 63 to 37 excluding Don’t Knows) if they could be assured that they’d be personally £500 a year better off.

However, if merely assured that they’d be neither better nor worse off that they are now, the No vote narrowly came out on top, by (again excluding DKs) 54 to 46. An obvious question therefore presented itself: just how big a bribe do Scots need to take responsibility for their own country?

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The headline findings of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey compiled every year by ScotCen are of limited use in the context of the independence referendum. The main constitutional question it asks is deeply unhelpful, with a vague, all-encompassing “devolution” option that tell us next to nothing about how Scots will vote.

(To be fair, that’s not the survey’s fault – it was designed long before the referendum was ever thought of as a reality, for a broader purpose, and asks the same questions every year for consistency of comparison.)

But the results for 2013 are interesting – as they always are – because they tell us what Scotland thinks when the debate is moved away from overtly political questions, they tell us where the arguments are being won and lost, and they enable us to determine just why Scots are the only people on Earth who’ve been (so far) successfully made scared of running their own country.

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It’s a start, we suppose. But it doesn’t take long for the UK government’s latest independence “fact sheet” to start telling fibs again. It barely gets a quarter of the way through its very first sentence before dropping a big old porky on those assembled:

Much as we’d like to think otherwise, there’s no such thing as a “forever decision” in politics. Whether Scotland votes for or against independence, it could change in the future. The USSR fragmented, East and West Germany reunited (having been abruptly split up after the “Thousand Year Reich” only actually managed 12), and even our own lifetimes have seen countless realignments and redivisions of states across the world.

So what else in the paper is, to use the technical term, total cobblers?

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Veteran readers will be aware that there are basically two types of misinformation perpetrated by the Scottish media. The rarer type is the flat-out lie, where things that are simply demonstrably untrue are presented as facts – a common example being the regular assertion by journalists that all three Unionist parties are committed to giving Holyrood new additional powers after a No vote, which was neatly skewered by Andrew Nicoll in yesterday’s Sun (image link, no paywall).

The subtler variety is when newspapers and broadcasters report true information in a misleading way, sometimes so drastically that it comes out meaning the exact opposite of what it actually means. A story today is a case in point.

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The Herald, 4 October 2013:

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Much gratitude tonight to alert reader “Albamac”, who’s not only compiled the whole of “The Claim Of Scotland” into a single very small (1MB), easy-download PDF file but has converted it in the process into one with cut-and-pasteable text for quotability. We’ve uploaded it to the Repository, and you can also download it from this direct link.

Big love once again too to Wilma Watts who made our serialisation possible in the first place, and to the sadly-deceased Herbert James Paton for writing a book that for the most part could have been released yesterday. We highly recommend it as a starting point for any undecideds you know who might not want to jump straight into the debate with something as openly partisan as this site. Having read it, we suspect they’ll be hungry for more truth, and then you can send them our way.

The latest in the UK government’s “Scotland Analysis” series of independence briefing papers was released this week on the back of William Hague’s visit to Glasgow.

At 119 pages, the EU and International Issues paper is nobody’s idea of a slim pamphlet, but it’s remarkably light on meaty content.

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For those of you wanting to look at the report on broadcasting bias from the University of the West of Scotland, we’ve uploaded it to the Repository, and you can also grab it directly from this link. Thanks to the alert readers who sent it in.

We doubt if anyone is going to faint with amazement from the discovery that an academic study has found TV news coverage of the independence debate was biased against the Yes side by a 3-2 margin between September 2012 and September 2013.

But what’s useful about the University of West of Scotland research is that it sets out the exact nature of the various types of biases, and gives a precise number for how many times each type occurred. This moves us on considerably, because complaints can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than (to misquote Derek Bateman) the paranoia of nationalists obsessing over how many times Jackie Bird raises her left eyebrow while reading from an autocue.

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We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:

“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”

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Step 1: Write an offensive, provocative piece of trollbait for the Daily Mail, describing your opponents as “kilted bum-barers who bellow ‘freedom’ whenever an English person hoves into view” and suggesting that a Yes vote is an abdication of morality.

(If you can then somehow get the Guardian to reprint it, bonus!)

Step 2: Whine like a baby when you get the response you wanted all along.

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When we started the week with news of the UK government’s statement on debt, we wondered aloud whether it would be a game-changing moment. Judging by the No camp’s reaction since then, shrieking and flailing and lashing out blindly in all directions simultaneously, our question’s been answered.

It’s been hard to keep track of it all, but we’ll have a go.

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