Wings Over Scotland

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?“

We think the Scotsman may finally have jumped the shark this morning. A piece by Scott Macnab (which we’re not going to link to, but have made a local copy of) on the No campaign’s year-old “decoy dossier” from yesterday is so extraordinarily, laughably biased and transparently dishonest that it couldn’t see even the most distant edges of decent, honourable journalism with the Hubble Space Telescope.

It is, however, just the most nakedly partisan of a series of Scottish newspaper headlines and lead stories this morning that once and for all give the lie to the notion that the country is served by anything remotely resembling a fair and balanced media.

We’ve spoken a few times of the “swarm of wasps” approach to large-scale lying that’s frequently deployed by the anti-independence movement. But this week’s desperate, co-ordinated, all-fronts onslaught on truth is more akin to a sudden mass infestation of hundreds of nasty, disease-ridden little bugs, trying to be too many to stamp on.

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According to today’s GERS report, in the financial year 2011-2012 Scottish public-sector revenue including a geographical share of North Sea revenue was estimated at £56.9 billion (9.9% of the UK’s total). As in previous years, Scotland’s 8.4% of the UK population is doing more than its share of generating the country’s money.

The total public-sector expenditure of the Scottish government, local government, money spent “on behalf of” Scotland by the Westminster government and on Scotland’s share of UK debt-interest payments (up £400m to £4.1bn) was £64.5bn – equivalent to 9.3% of total UK public-sector expenditure.

Scotland’s estimated net fiscal balance was a deficit of £7.6bn (or 5.0% of Scotland’s GDP). The UK’s equivalent position was a deficit of £121bn (or 7.9% of GDP), meaning that Scotland is in significantly better financial shape than the UK as a whole.

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Students of the Scottish media weren’t exactly surprised when the BBC’s Glenn Campbell published a story yesterday lunchtime (12.07pm) entitled “Scottish independence: Luxembourg warns against ‘going separate ways'” and opening with the more specific line “The government of Luxembourg has warned against Scotland becoming an independent country.”

Experienced observers were considerably less than astonished when the government of Luxembourg issued an angry denial a few hours later (reported at 5.57pm), claiming that their minister’s words had been misrepresented by the UK state broadcaster. News site Wort.lu reported:

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

So far so standard, then.

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