Wings Over Scotland

Vince Cable in today’s Herald:

“Millions of Scots will lose out on an RBS share bonanza worth up to £800 if they choose independence, Business Secretary Vince Cable has warned.

The Treasury is considering giving every taxpayer in the UK shares in RBS as part of a give-away ahead of the next general election. Coalition sources calculate the windfall could be worth £400 to £800 per person.

Coalition Cabinet minister Mr Cable said his Liberal Democrat party backed the payout to ensure taxpayers benefit from 2008’s billion-pound bailout of the Edinburgh institution, although he cautioned the Coalition not to “rush” the process.

Asked if Scots would get a chance to benefit in an independent Scotland, he said: “No. It is at the moment vested in the British Government.”

Even leaving aside the astonishingly crude bribery/blackmail aspect, we’re still a bit confused. Unionists constantly tell us that RBS is “Scottish”, and that therefore an independent Scotland should take on all of its debt. But apparently the people of the rUK will still own the whole bank, so they’ll get all the shares and the profits.

Sometimes, readers, it really does seem like the No camp is devoting most of its anti-independence efforts to putting us out of a job.

As we’ve mentioned before, it really has been a revelation to discover that the Daily Record’s iPad app – which gives you the entire printed paper, not just the selection of stories that reach the Record website – is free on weekdays. Today, for example, it brought us a large not-online Page 2 piece on former Tory cabinet minister Liam Fox’s idiotic hardline policy suggestions for the party, which were expertly ridiculed by Conservative commentator Alex Massie yesterday.

Thanks to Mr Massie’s splendid work, there’s no need for us to bother with Fox’s comments. What we noticed instead was the Record’s analysis of them.

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It’s nice to see Scottish Labour taking turns. Today it’s Richard Baker who’s been wheeled out to spout idiotic and instantly-disproveable untruths at the Scottish public.

Shall we?

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When the Daily Record lost Magnus Gardham to the Herald, they made sure to call on a like-for-like replacement. Torcuil Crichton, the newspaper’s self-styled “man in Westminster” (and who has never approved a single comment on his political blog in almost five years), is Gardham’s only rival as the most virulently and overtly Unionist staff reporter – as opposed to opinion columnist – in the Scottish media.

A story under Mr Crichton’s name today, though, is unsubtle even by his standards.

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Power Of Scotland is a newspaper about the power industry, given away as a business supplement with The Times. An alert contributor pointed us to an intriguing article in the latest edition from regular Scotsman columnist Peter Jones, offering a more nuanced account of the industry’s view of independence than you might expect.

If you’re pressed for time we’ve pulled out a couple of the more interesting passages.

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It’s weird watching the Sunday papers all decrying the media’s handling of Wednesday’s leaked Scottish Government document. Everyone seems to agree that the Cabinet paper wasn’t any kind of smoking gun – the consensus is that John Swinney’s comments were sensible, cautious and largely misrepresented in the press.

Eddie Barnes in Scotland on Sunday, for example, noted that “Few of the issues presented within the report were in any way revelatory” (though it didn’t stop him from referring to them as “revelations” later in the piece anyway), but then diffidently observed that they “produced a disastrous set of headlines”, as if his own publication hadn’t written any of them, and as if it wasn’t continuing to do so on the very same day Barnes’ piece hit the newsstands.

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Poe’s Law, which we only discovered on Wikipedia this morning, says that “without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism”. Or in other words, there’s a name for when people are so batshit crazy you can’t satirise them, because you simply couldn’t invent anything madder than what they say for real.

It’s in that context we invite readers to consider a recent story in the Scottish Sun.

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We’ve just had to have a bit of a sit down after trying in vain to get our heads around the dizzying spin deployed in a story in this morning’s Herald, which appears to utilise some form of crazed Catch 22 to ensure that no matter whether an independent Scotland was stony broke or rolling in cash, it’d still end up skint.

We’ll give you a moment to guess who wrote it, and then we’re going to step through the piece line by line and see if we can figure out what sort of madness is afoot.

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Catastrophe! Scottish independence (surely “separation”?) will destroy your old-age pension, says yesterday’s Scottish Daily Express.

We suppose we better vote No to keep them safe, then.

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An alert reader gives us advance notice that the BBC are planning a live online readers’-question-and-answer session with Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Something to coincide with the Scottish Lib Dem spring conference next week. Here’s the one we submitted – we feel sure the BBC will select it to ask him.

“Mr Rennie, do you think it’s conducive to a constructive debate to insultingly refer to people who disagree with you as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, as you did in response to the recent vote in favour of independence by a large branch of the postal-workers’ union which covered your own parliamentary region? Would it have been acceptable for Blair Jenkins or Nicola Sturgeon to dismiss all the Glasgow University students who voted No in their mock referendum as ‘daft wee kids who don’t know anything about life’?”

Why not send in yours too?

From the Luxembourg newspaper Wort.lu on Tuesday:

“Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister has backtracked on a comment about Scotland’s independence which was quoted in the British media, saying it was misinterpreted.“

From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

“The minister’s spokesman has made clear to the BBC that he has ‘no problems’ with our reporting of his remarks.” (column 3)

Hmm, that’s a tricky one.

The Scottish Sun Says, 7th March 2013:

“Here’s a radical idea for the Better Together campaign.

Just once, just for a change, let’s hear something positive about why Scotland would be better staying part of the United Kingdom. Because frankly, the scare stories are wearing a bit thin.

The latest is over a leaked SNP document that’s cue for a doom-laden warning about slashing pensions, cutting defence spending and shedding public sector jobs. Strip away the hysteria and what you actually have is a sensible Government prepared to make sensible decisions about spending. A Government aware they are operating in a tough economic climate where there is no bottomless pit of money.

And that’s whether you’re an independent country or part of the UK. Is there a single household in Scotland that doesn’t have similar conversations about what they can and can’t afford? It would be a shambolic Government that didn’t behave in the same responsible way.

Bear in mind, too, this document was written a year ago in different economic circumstances and that oil prices and revenues have risen. The net effect and the hard fact is that the finances of Scots are £863-a-head healthier than the rest of the UK.

Or isn’t that scary enough to tell folk?“