Wings Over Scotland

In an interesting addition to the independence debate today, Jim Gallagher (former director-general for devolution in the UK government, and senior adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown on devolution strategy from 2007 to 2010) has written about the “positive case” from a business perspective for Scotland to remain in the UK.

His article for the Scotsman, entitled “Referendum comes down to money”,  is billed as “Rising to a challenge to make a positive case for the Union”. In it Gallagher argues that it’s only through membership of the Union that Scotland benefits from free trade.

Let’s see if he has a point.

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There’s a lot of cobblers talked about independence, so with only a limited number of hours in the day it’s important to know when you can safely stop reading something, because the person being quoted is clearly a clueless buffoon who’s forgotten to take the little green pills again and can be ignored without fear of missing anything.

In the case of the Herald’s lead story today, it’s four paragraphs in:

“He also warned the debate about self-government could lead to Orkney and Shetland, which are agitating for more powers, removing themselves and their oil wealth from Scotland.”

Yeah, thanks, Sir John Elvidge. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

With the official campaigns now over a year old, we can’t help wondering whether “Better Together Glasgow” shouldn’t have been launched before now.

But this is a funny sort of “public meeting”, isn’t it?

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Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.

But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.

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This site spends much of its time highlighting major outbreaks of misrepresentation, spin, distortion and outright lying in the Scottish and UK media. Readers will be aware that we very rarely find ourselves short of material.

Which means that we don’t often have time to report the small stuff.

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Whenever there’s a discussion of women’s voting intentions in the referendum, it’s striking how quickly it all slides into stereotyping. Maybe that’s inevitable when you set out to examine the collective motivations of a group of diverse individuals who basically have one characteristic in common. Sometimes it feels like asking what all red-haired or right-handed people think.

Attempting to speak for all women, then, is a bit like herding cats. So let’s not try.

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We were struck by a curious vision when watching Thursday’s edition of Scotland Tonight. The show bizarrely chose to focus its attention on the manufactured outrage about Elliot Bulmer’s article for the Herald, with the alleged serious criminal offence which led to the “revelation” reduced to a minor incidental footnote.

And we found ourselves wondering what would have happened if the producers had gotten their scripts mixed up, and treated the other big news story of the day – the conviction of MSP Bill Walker for a string of domestic assaults on family members between 1967 and 1995 – the way it handled the Yes Scotland hacking story.

We think it might have gone a bit like this.

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We had an interesting discussion on Twitter this afternoon with the Guardian’s Severin Carrell. As a result, we decided to check something out that we hadn’t seen anyone be clear about, and the upshot is that we can now confirm, from what we’ll call “an extremely well-placed source”, that the Herald was fully aware, every step of the way, that Elliot Bulmer’s piece had been commissioned by Yes Scotland, and that it was submitted to the Herald through Yes Scotland.

It was, therefore, solely and exclusively the Herald’s responsibility to disclose, or not disclose, anything and everything to do with the article’s provenance that it considered pertinent. The Herald chose to publish the piece (having no obligation to do so). The Herald knew precisely where it came from and by what route. The Herald chose not to mention the Yes Scotland connection (which it was also under no obligation to do). Yes Scotland, and Elliot Bulmer, hid nothing from anyone.

Them’s the facts. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. That is all.

So, to the elephant in the room, then. Certain elements of the Scottish press are busting a gut today in an attempt to fabricate a scandal around a man writing some honest opinions in a newspaper for money.

Judging by the tone of the coverage, it seems they have a case, in so far as that Scottish newspapers are plainly no place for honesty.

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We try very very hard not to be crude on this website. But sometimes you’ve just got to bite the bullet and point out that someone’s a completely boneheaded moron who shouldn’t be sent out for bread and milk without grown-up supervision, let alone given a senior political position in what was once a respectable major party.

Margaret Curran wants to be Secretary of State for Scotland.

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We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.

We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.

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There’s a rather horrible article by Margaret Curran in the Scotsman today. (No real news there.) It’s a combination of empty noise and ugly smears about the pursuit of independence – an attempt to engage directly with the rest of the world in our own right – being xenophobic and inward-looking and all the usual rubbish.

But we thought it might be interesting to take a look at a single paragraph, examine it forensically and see what it was actually saying. We chose one from near the end, because to be honest we’d be amazed if anyone else had actually had the fortitude to wade that far through Curran’s  plodding, will-sapping prose.

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