Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been meaning to nag someone to present this data in a super-snappy visual form for ages, then what do you know except that the splendid Stewart Bremner just pops up out of nowhere and does it without even being asked.

Independence will NOT “abandon England to the Tories”. If the people of the rest of the UK choose to vote Tory, we can’t save them from themselves, even were we to be so arrogant as to assume we had any business doing so. If they choose to vote Labour, they’re equally capable of electing them just fine without our help.

Scottish votes are almost totally irrelevant to UK elections. We have no impact on the government England gets. They, on the other hand, force governments that we voted against on us more than 60% of the time. That’s not a union of equals. That’s the political equivalent of domestic abuse. It’s never the wrong time to walk away.

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David Cameron, 6 May 2011:

“If they want to hold a referendum, I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fibre that I have.”

David Cameron, 15 September 2013:

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Isn’t it weird how since we did this, everyone’s suddenly started asking much more interesting questions in opinion polls about independence?

After months with almost no polling at all, and what there was being restricted to boring Yes/No affairs, there’s been an explosion in surveys conducted by every conceivable pollster for everyone and his dog, and nearly every one has followed our lead in digging below the headline response and trying to find out what makes Scottish voters tick when it comes to their views on the constitution.

Today has two new sets of data to chew over, with fascinating results.

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This is a leaflet distributed to pupils at Ellon Academy in Aberdeenshire this week. It was put together by “the school’s Better Together team” as part of the lead-up to a mini-referendum this Tuesday and sent to us by a concerned parent.

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We already knew that Jackie Baillie had a somewhat shaky grasp of chronology. Last week she told Newsnight Scotland that to find some of the £50m required for Scotland to subsidise the UK government’s bedroom tax, she’d magically travel into the past and un-spend £7m (or as she put it, £10m) of tourism investment that’s likely to bring 20 times that much into the Scottish economy.

And on today’s Good Morning Scotland, she had another balletic prance around in the timestream, speaking from the present about how the past was the future.

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NOTICE: It has come to our attention that an article on Wings Over Scotland last week contained a factual error. In the post “One man and his props”, we alleged that in addition to a fake government paper brandished by the deputy leader of the Labour Party in Scotland during a televised debate, a “real” one had also been produced.

We have subsequently discovered that in fact, both papers were entirely fake. We apologise unreservedly to Anas Sarwar for the implication that he was telling the truth. We ought to have known better.

Sometimes it’s hard not to salute the Scottish media’s sheer dogged, implacable commitment to misinformation, even in the face of seemingly-impossible odds.

Yesterday’s fiasco at First Minister’s Questions, where Johann Lamont dug herself a great big hole while trying to smear a successful Scottish businessman and imply corruption where none existed, was so farcically absurd and ham-fisted that the Scotsman had to bite its tongue and report it with the headline “Apology demanded over Lamont’s SNP land deal claim”.

Even Newsnight Scotland couldn’t brush it off, with hapless Labour MSP James Kelly wheeled on as the sacrificial bam sent to bluster his way through some rather timid questioning from Gordon Brewer. But no such trifling concepts as basic journalistic integrity or competence were going to trouble Magnus Gardham at the Herald.

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You know how it is when you’re writing a satirical newspaper website like The Onion or The Daily Mash. There’s a very fine line to walk such that a joke article is ridiculous enough to be funny, yet still just plausible enough to fool the unwary into believing it’s a real story, and it takes real skill to get it right.

So we wish the best of luck to promising new outfit “The Express”, who’ve perhaps just overcooked it a bit with this effort, but definitely show some potential.

Wait, what?

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The papers, as you’d expect, take some differing views today of John Swinney’s draft Scottish Government budget, delivered in the Holyrood chamber yesterday. But two articles in particular caught our eye.

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Alert readers will doubtless have spotted the news that the UK government is to press ahead with the sell-off of the Royal Mail. After all, with brutal job cuts under both Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments having put over 50,000 people out of work in recent years the post is now not just viable but profitable, and we couldn’t possibly have hundreds of millions of pounds in annual profits flowing back into the Treasury’s hands to provide public services for taxpayers when they could be flogged to private companies to enrich the wealthy.

The sale is overwhelmingly opposed by Royal Mail employees, and by the public at large, across party boundaries. But it’s far from unique in that regard. It’s just hard to see how anything can be done about it.

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We’re most grateful to the eagle-eyed reader who spotted something today that had escaped our notice, and apparently also that of the Scottish media. When we were trying to figure out the likely membership of “Scottish Labour” back in June, the most recent set of accounts for the branch (or “Accounting Unit” as it’s officially termed) on the Electoral Commission website were those for 2011.

It turns out that we were in just a bit too early. The 2012 ones were published a mere four weeks later, and they paint a worrying picture for Johann Lamont and her pals.

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As you can perhaps tell, we’re starting to run out of post titles referencing “1984” and the Ingsoc habit of rewriting newspaper versions of history to pretend that certain things which happened didn’t happen, and vice versa. Here’s today’s case in point:

Wait a minute – “shifts to”? Are we sure about that?

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