Wings Over Scotland

…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.

“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)

So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.

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Chapter 8 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

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Just a wee round-up.

“Plan for Ukip ‘vote swap’ with Tories to to keep Miliband out of No. 10

Writer and Conservative campaigner Toby Young plans to launch a website that will encourage Conservatives and Ukip supporters to pledge to swap votes in margnial constiuencies”

We’re going to assume they mean “marginal” and “constituencies” there. (Even the Telegraph can’t afford sub-editors now?) But hey, it’s a comforting thought, right?

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It says something about the baleful influence of the right-wing press (not to mention Tory, UKIP and Labour politicians desperate to seek its favour) that some people in Scotland mention immigration as a reason for voting No.

Of the many scare stories originating south of the border, this one is among the least applicable to Scotland. (But is still perpetuated in the media because no major Scottish newspapers are actually owned here.) Scotland needs immigrants, and without sustained immigration over the next half century, we could be in trouble.

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Just a quick one, folks. Here’s a story we touched on earlier today, that appeared in today’s Scotsman and Daily Record. (It even briefly showed up in the Herald, but was deleted faster than we could save it.) At first glance it appears to be identical in both papers, but it isn’t. In fact there’s a rather substantial difference. Can you spot it?

The Scotsman and Herald both carry stories today reporting an Ipsos-MORI poll which found that only 14% of voters considered themselves to be “well-informed” about the referendum debate, and that two-thirds of the electorate had difficulty in discerning whether what they were being told was true or not.

Since this site’s entire reason for existence is to demonstrate that what much of the No campaign and the Scottish media tells people is either distorted, misleading or flat-out untrue, we can’t say those findings surprise us much. But there was an interesting nugget buried in the poll data which the papers didn’t pick up on.

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Chapter 7 of “The Claim Of Scotland”:

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Yesterday saw one of the odder incidents to date in the Scottish media’s coverage of the independence debate. Both the Herald and Scotsman ran almost word-for-word-identical articles reporting the findings of a Glasgow University study into the nature of the debate on Twitter, which concluded (in line with previous research) that Yes campaigners were far more active on the social network than No ones, and that the Yes campaign was far more grassroots than its “top-down” opponent.

We were pleased to get a namecheck in both pieces, but the curious aspect was the length that the articles went to in order to provide a couple of examples of “unofficial” No advocates. It’s now over a year since we first observed the death of Unionist blogging, so it’s understandable that the study had trouble digging anything up, but the representatives they settled on boggled quite a few minds.

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We were a little bemused to read in today’s Herald (and also to hear on “Good Morning Scotland”) of the appointment of Professor Jim Gallagher as an official adviser to “Better Together”. Not because we’d been in any doubt about the academic’s views on independence, but because the Herald had already identified Prof. Gallagher as the No campaign’s “Director of Research” in a referendum supplement back in December.

Indeed, the Herald article goes on to note that “Mr Gallagher has been working behind the scenes for Better Together for several months”. So today seems a pertinent moment to revisit a letter we sent after reading the supplement to Ian Stewart, the editor of The Scotsman, and to which we’re still awaiting a response.

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Lord McConnell got the velvet-lined kid-gloves treatment from Scotland Tonight last night over his calls for the pro- and anti-independence campaigns to have a two-week ceasefire during the Commonwealth Games. Mysteriously, the programme didn’t feel it was at all relevant to draw comparisons to how the No camp behaved during the last major sporting event that took place in the UK.

No, definitely no politicking going on there.

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Chapter 6 of “The Claim Of Scotland”.

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