Wings Over Scotland

In truth, the “Better Together” campaign jumped the shark a long time ago. Whether it was #500questions, or the mobile-phone roaming charges story (the moment when even a supportive media started saying “Oh, come on”), or any of literally dozens of others, the fact of the matter is that it’s been engaged for at least a year now in some sort of 110m Shark Hurdling event.

Or perhaps some sort of Shark Pentathlon, starting with a Shark Long Jump, followed by the Shark Hurdles, Shark High Jump, Shark Triple Jump and culminating in a Shark Pole Vault. Frankly, on current form the only way the No campaign could get any more clearance over the shark is with a nuclear-powered pogo stick.

But still, you have to admire the way they keep trying for a new record.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days. (Which have already broken last week’s all-time record for one-week pageviews, incidentally.)

1. Comical Ali’s perfect game
The “Better Together” mailshot where literally every sentence is a lie.

2. The killer inside
The Madness Of Prince George (Osborne).

3. What you won’t read today
Actual financially-literate people assess Scotland’s currency options.

4. Turn and river
The real meaning behind the currency threat.

5. They don’t care about you
Scottish Labour admit they’ll hurt Scotland to win Westminster.

This week’s theme: the positive case for the Union.

A poll conducted by a Scottish Asian radio station and reported in today’s Sunday Herald offers the encouraging news that 64% of its listeners back a Yes vote in the independence referendum, exactly twice as many as those planning to vote No (32%, for those of you with hangovers).

But in a week which seems to have left Yes supporters excited and buoyant – despite what the media has frantically attempted to spin as bad news –  the piece also contained a few sobering quotes that illustrate the nature and size of the wall the Yes campaign has to scale if it’s to emerge victorious.

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This piece just appeared in a little corner of the Scottish Sun:

Kudos to the paper for raising the issue of the No camp’s incredible, almost Stalinist levels of censorship, known well to those inside the debate but only measured thanks to the diligent work of the Facebook group “Silenced by Better Together”.

We know the accusations are true because we’ve experienced it first-hand. Without ever posting anything abusive or offensive, we got ourselves deleted and blocked by BT within hours of first posting there, and we’ve seen countless examples of completely innocuous posts being removed and their authors blocked.

We do have one quick question, though.

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Actually, now that we come to examine it in detail, this one’s quite special. We think EVERY single sentence in the official No campaign’s latest mailshot might be a lie.

Let’s step through it and see if they’ve really pulled off a hundred-percenter.

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We’re always amused when we get our weekly email from “Better Together”, begging for money. Because that’s invariably what they are – the standard template is a short preamble about whatever the issue of the day is, followed by “which means you need to SEND US CASH NOW”. (We might be a crowd-funded website, but hey, at least we only ask readers to cough up a couple of times a year, not every few days.)

Sometimes we’re so busy chuckling at the convoluted panhandling of an organisation more used to six-figure cheques from Tory businessmen than soliciting the odd tenner from members of the public (and at the obvious lies like the second paragraph) that we miss a more interesting line. But we were on top of things this week.

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As we’ve noted before, the Independent is by a large distance the most English of all the UK’s “national” newspapers. Alone among its peers, it has no Scottish edition, no Scottish news section, no Scottish editor, not even a full-time Scottish correspondent. It struggles to shift 3,000 (not a typo – THREE thousand) copies a day in Scotland.

So if we were conducting a panel debate about Scotland on a news channel, we’re not sure that the paper’s chief political commentator Steve Richards is the guy we’d call for expertise. But the BBC, bless it, has other ideas.

That notwithstanding, today’s edition of Dateline London was an interesting watch. Correspondents from the USA, China and Greece, and host Gavin Esler, offered some largely insightful comments, only occasionally interrupted by Richards butting in in a desperate attempt to get the discussion back on the standard UK-media line.

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The Scottish and UK press has been packed solid for the last 48 hours with strangely uniform assessments of how George Osborne has conclusively smashed the Scottish Government’s position on an independent Scotland’s currency.

We’ve offered our own analysis, and various politicians and professional activists on the No side have been pouring ugly, borderline-xenophobic scorn and sneering on other nations which use some of the alternative options to a formal Sterling union, which is usually a sure sign that they’re scared of something.

So it seemed worthwhile to collect together the views of some proper financial experts in one place for handy reference, because the cosy consensus in the UK media doesn’t seem to be reflected by people who actually know what they’re talking about. Read the rest of this entry →

Sometimes you have to wonder if the Scottish Wars of Independence are actually over. Throughout many long centuries, Scottish independence was seen by England not just as a threat, but as something that wasn’t actually legal.

Throughout the medieval period, the argument revolved around homage – which Scottish King had done homage to which English king, hence confirming the fact of feudal overlordship and thus the Scottish monarch’s subordinate position. When that was denied, violence was the usual result. And in his own only slightly more modern way, George Osborne this week declared the same war once more.

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Labour’s Michael Kelly on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, explaining that Scottish Labour MPs and MSPs would “to a person” back Ed Balls refusing a currency union, even if it damaged Scotland, because otherwise Labour might lose a UK election:

It’s nice to know clearly and unambiguously where Scotland stands as far as Scottish Labour’s concerned, isn’t it, readers? The only purpose of Scottish votes is to get Labour into power at Westminster, even if it means hurting Scotland to do it.

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In our public-funded role of monitoring the Scottish and UK media, readers, there is but one major frustration. Time and again we find ourselves figuratively – and occasionally really – screaming at newspapers or TV screens, unable to understand why we’re the only people who can actually hear what politicians are saying.

In a world full of seasoned political reporters, it seems inconceivable that we’d be the only people who understand their special language of evasion and obfuscation and code, yet over and over, journalists and broadcasters seem unable to pick up on comments that couldn’t be any clearer if they were written out in neon tubes, taped to a hammer and smashed into the interviewer’s face.

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