Wings Over Scotland

Karine Polwart is a Scottish folk singer and Green Party supporter. Earlier today we highlighted a curious editorial choice by Scotland On Sunday, which framed a column she’d written on independence as an attack on the SNP, despite Ms Polwart not mentioning the SNP anywhere in the text, either directly or indirectly.

Below is the text of a post on her Facebook page this morning, after SoS deputy editor Kenny Farquharson tried unsuccessfully to defend the use of the anti-SNP headline:

“Full text of my wee rant in favour of Yes Scotland in today’s Scotland on Sunday. For clarity, the title is not mine. If I’d wanted to frame my piece as an explicit go at the SNP then I would’ve done so.

YES Scotland is not a covert SNP operation. I believe the independents, Greens, socialists, and growing number of pro-Indy Labour and Liberal activists bless if there are any of the latter left) must shape that agenda too. Anyway, here’s to more voices being heard, and more proper heartfelt and visionary exchange between us about what’s WRONG, and why, and what might fix it (whether you think Independence is a possible answer or not).”

(Two small typos fixed for readability, otherwise unchanged. Original here.)

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We’re not quite sure what someone put in the tea at the Sunday Mail this morning, but the quoted-for-truth excerpt we’ve reproduced further down this post (emphasis ours) comes from what is a simply extraordinary editorial considering the source.

We’ve been saying the same thing since 2011, of course, but seeing it in the Mail is a bit like the Telegraph saying “Y’know, communism isn’t all THAT bad”. The Indiana Jones analogy, and what it implies about independence, is particularly startling.

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Headlines can be the bane of a writer’s life. Often – including on this site – an article will go out with a different title to the one the author originally envisaged, as part of the subbing process. Occasionally (if the sub-editor or editor isn’t very good at their job) the title can be one which the author feels misrepresents what they’ve written.

We have no idea whether or not that’s the case with a column in today’s Scotland On Sunday, penned by folk singer Karine Polwart, which goes under the eye-catching headline “Why I’ll vote Yes despite the SNP”. We’ll simply observe that there’s a fairly important word in that title which doesn’t appear at all in the actual article – and that indeed the thing the word describes is not referred to, or even obliquely implied, anywhere in the author’s words – and leave you to arrive at your own conclusions.

We note with interest a letter in the Scotsman today:

“This debate about the word “separation” is annoying and a distraction from the real issues. I am waiting for some answers from the SNP about the potential shape of an independent Scotland. This is a waste of time.

J ADAMS
Harrison Gardens
Edinburgh”

We’re not in the SNP, Mr Adams, but we’re happy to help you out anyway.

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As the son of a multi-millionaire, hereditary Labour MP Anas Sarwar has probably never had to think very much about money in his life. We’re not sure that’s an excuse for the mind-numbing arithmetical stupidity of what he says in the Daily Record today.

Proposing to “turn up the heat on the SNP by tearing apart some of their main policies”, and more specifically by continuing Labour’s enormously unpopular assault on universal services, Sarwar is reported by the paper as saying:

“there is no point funding free care for the elderly when half the people in the poorest parts of Scotland do not live long enough to take advantage.”

Bizarrely – and not for the first time it pains us to be obliged to spell out something so blindingly obvious – it seems to have escaped Mr Sarwar’s attention that dead people don’t require care. Therefore, the policy only requires to be funded for the people who DO live long enough to obtain its benefits, which means that the only financial savings to be made would be those made at the expense of old, sick, but still alive people.

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We haven’t had anything from the Scottish Political Archive for a wee while, so in the light of today’s doom-mongering about the dangers of aggressive separatists, we thought we’d share a few other warnings from through the ages. Click to size up.

And just to bring us right up to date, there’s a bonus leaflet below.

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In this site’s view, the single most important truth that YesScotland will need to convey to the Scottish electorate if it wants to win the 2014 independence referendum is the reality of what a No vote will mean for devolution. It’s a theme we’ve covered extensively, and will continue to highlight because it’s the core thing the Unionist campaign don’t want people to know.

All three London-run parties are engaged in the pretence that if Scots reject full control of their own affairs they’ll be showered with new powers by Westminster, despite that premise collapsing under the slightest scrutiny. But today an alert reader pointed us towards something that reveals a much more convincing reality.

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There’s a rather interesting story buried deep down in the dusty undergrowth of the Scotsman’s politics section today, featuring Jeremy Purvis of the cross-party “Devo Plus” (remember THEM?) group, which apparently marks its anniversary this month.

Purvis’s campaign (also featuring former Tory Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson and, um, we’re sure we’ll recall the others shortly) pretty much died at birth – its Twitter account last saw action on November 30 last year and we can’t even tell when the website was last updated because it has no timestamps, but it was a LONG time ago. He seems to have sensed an opportunity today, though, and has called on what the Scotsman rather startlingly refers to as “the anti-independence parties” to support Devo +’s proposals to devolve full tax powers to Holyrood in the event of a No vote.

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We’re becoming increasingly concerned that perhaps Scotland SHOULD extinguish any remaining vestiges of independence and allow itself to be incorporated into a Greater England, if our education system is anything to go by.

We’ve highlighted on several occasions a catastrophically poor grasp of arithmetic in the Scottish populace, although for some reason it seems to be restricted to those intending to vote No in the referendum.

“20 times 10 is 500” is bad even for Rangers fans, though.

There’s a faintly astonishing story in today’s Scotsman. As if belatedly realising the damage that they’d done to the No campaign by detailing Labour’s toys-out-of-pram tantrum in the House Of Commons this week, the paper runs a firefighting exercise of a follow-up piece which reveals no new information, but gives the party a helpful platform from which to try to winch itself out of the hole.

(A “senior party source” duly obliged with the comically-absurd assertion that “the party’s main concern was that without a reference to independence, an MP could be stopped from speaking for going off the subject.”)

That’s not the astonishing part, of course – giving Unionist parties a platform is what the Scotsman exists for. The amazing thing is the size of the gulf between what the story reports as the reason for the debate’s cancellation and what the person whose debate it was had already said in public a full day earlier.

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Fans of TV panel shows will probably be aware of a regular strand on the BBC’s Mock The Week called “Between The Lines”, in which one comedian delivers lines from a speech in the persona of a public figure, while the other translates what they really mean. There’s a chucklesome example here.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to have our own attempt, with a letter sent out this week to the No campaign’s mailing list by the independence debate’s own Hugh Dennis: “Better Together” campaign director and creative truth interpreter Blair McDougall.

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We’ve spoken before on this site about a couple of political concepts based around different ways of winning votes by bombarding the electorate with untruths so relentlessly that they come to be accepted as fact.

One of them, the “Big Lie”, was a term infamously coined by Hitler to describe a strategy regularly deployed by the Nazis in which a falsehood would be perpetrated which was so diametrically and spectacularly at odds with the reality, people would instinctively reject the thought that anyone would have the bare-faced audacity to say it if it wasn’t true, and therefore it must be.

Language needs some kind of brand new term, though, to accurately encapsulate the magnitude of what Scottish Labour have just tried to pull off.

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