Wings Over Scotland

Readers might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu on watching last night's Newsnight Scotland, which featured a rather animated interview with Alistair Darling. Because not for the first time, the No campaign chief seemed to be experiencing a considerable amount of difficulty in getting his story straight.

Let's examine a couple of intriguing snippets.

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Wait, sorry. We got confused. As far as we can establish from some recent official statements by the UK Government, the No campaign and the media, Mars is in fact the only place that the Trident weapons system definitely WON’T be going if Scotland votes for independence. Let’s have a quick recap on where we’re up to.

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This site’s primary purpose is the provision of facts. We want to persuade people of the merits of independence, but we want to do it with the truth, which is why we have a conspicuous policy of providing links whenever we make factual assertions. That often means criticising other media when it adopts a more lax approach to upholding proper journalistic standards, whether we like that media or not.

Last night’s Scotland Tonight repeatedly made a casual assertion about opinion polls on independence which, as we’ll see in a moment, was simply untrue. We make, and intend, no suggestion that they did so from malice or bias. We’re just pointing out that they got it wrong, so that people will be armed with the correct facts.

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The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

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Inspired by Iain Macwhirter’s words in the Herald today, we knocked something up.

Click for full-size high-resolution image. Kids/teetotallers version below.

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Sometimes other writers say things better and/or more concisely than we could hope to, which is great as it’s a real time-saver for us, so we might make this a regular strand. Today’s QFT is from an excellent Iain Macwhirter piece in the Herald (as, coincidentally, was the first one), which is worth reading in its entirety, but from which we especially commend the following passages (our emphasis as ever):

“But supporters of independence hope that voters will eventually come to realise that, in a sense, they have no option but to go for broke in 2014. Scots will be the laughing stock of every stand-up comedian in Britain if they bottle out of self-government.“

“Anyone who believes that the UK Government is itching to give the Scottish Parliament more economic powers than those in last year’s Scotland Act really hasn’t been keeping up. The review of Barnett that will follow the implementation of the Scotland Act will be an opportunity for the Coalition to answer the charge that Scotland has been getting more than its fair share of public funding. With the threat of independence removed, the UK will no longer feel any need to placate Scottish demands for what many English voters believe is special treatment.“

Okay, it’s not quite as snappy as “Vote No, Get Nothing”, but it does have the benefit of being actually slightly more true.

Against our better judgement, we found browsing the Twitter feed of the Labour MP for Glasgow South (remember him?) on Friday for the first time in several months, after some irresponsible person (specifically this one) drew our attention to the fact that Tom was still boasting proudly about the Downfall-parody video clip that got him in trouble last year. And a couple of things struck us as at least vaguely interesting.

One was the “biog” entry below the avatar, which is a variant on a well-known chant often aired by fans of defunct Glasgow football club Rangers FC – “Nobody likes us, we don’t care”. It seems an odd, confrontational attitude to adopt for someone who relies entirely on being liked by the public to still have a job.

But it was the rest of the feed that revealed the oddest thing.

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We’ve been warning for a while now that the independence debate is likely to get uglier before it gets prettier this year, despite the protestations of the No camp that they want a mature and respectful discussion. The bleaker reality, however, is revealed by former Labour spin doctor Simon Pia in today’s Dundee Courier.

His column “The Long And Winding Road To 2014” isn’t online as far as we can tell, but the SNP’s Kevin Pringle kindly took a snapshot of the piece for us. You can click on the image above to read the whole thing, but one passage in particular is revealing when it comes to what we should expect in the next 18 months.

“What is particularly amusing is hearing the Nats appeal for a high-minded debate being echoed by Alistair Darling and the uber-unionists. One ploy Darling can be relied on is to bore everyone senseless over the debate while his underling big Blair McDougall and his “bettertogether” muckers get down and dirty in the gutter with Blair Jenkins and co of the Yes lot.

My money would be on Big Blair rather than wee skinny Blair for that one. But whether one likes it or not, it is in the interests of the unionsts to lower the tone.”

(Wings Over Scotland accepts no responsibility for the grammatical or literary failings of either Mr Pia or the Courier’s sub-editors, if it still has any.)

We’re inescapably reminded by Pia’s comments of an oft-quoted (and -misquoted) piece of wisdom that’s most commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”

We must admit, we’re having some trouble getting our heads round the lead story in today’s Herald. Under the headline “Row flares as Treasury blasts SNP oil dividend”, the paper quotes Danny Alexander outlining what the Chief Secretary to the Treasury appears to believe is a devastating case against independence – namely, that if you were to calculate oil revenues over the period since devolution, Scots would each be a grand total of £1 a year worse off independent than if Scotland remained in the UK.

We suspect that while Alexander’s figures may not be inaccurate as such – within their own carefully-selected frame of reference – this is nevertheless an example of the Many Small Lies principle (aka the Swarm Of Wasps), in that there are so many absurdly gaping holes in his argument that it’s difficult to know which one to focus on. So let’s see if we can quickly pick out just a handful and give them a brief once-over.

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In a slightly surprising development reported late this afternoon by the Guardian, the Ministry of Defence appeared to suddenly and officially confirm what most supporters of independence have asserted for some time: that if Scotland becomes independent the rUK will lose its nuclear deterrent, as it has nowhere else to put it.

In a surprisingly direct response to a question from CND, the Ministry revealed that “the safety arrangements for Devonport [naval base near Plymouth, widely regarded as the only possible alternative berth for the submarines] do not permit the presence of submarines carrying Trident nuclear warheads”, and that “The MoD’s safety experts are not considering changing that“.

It was already known that even if the submarines themselves could be docked in Devonport, there was no possibility of replicating the Coulport weapons base without years of work costing billions of pounds, but the MoD’s unexpected revelation, as well as being an apparent reversal of the Ministry’s position of a year ago, is a dramatic intervention with radical and complex implications for the independence debate.

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Yesterday we reported the excellent news that US media giant CNN’s travel arm had named Scotland their No.1 travel destination of 2013, a move likely to generate many millions of pounds in increased tourism business for the Scottish economy. And to their credit, both the Scotsman and Herald also covered the story.

(Though neither of them apparently recalled the extensive coverage they’d given to the Holyrood opposition parties savagely attacking the Scottish Government for spending money on two trips to America to promote Scotland there in 2012.)

The Herald’s piece was so tiny and buried it attracted no reader comments (or none were approved), but the Scotsman’s more prominent article did. Why not take a moment and glance below to revel in the warmth, joy and positivity with which the publication’s Unionist readers welcomed this unequivocally happy development?

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Journalists and broadcasters tend to be very prickly about allegations that they do their job in a biased way, and it’s a difficult claim to prove. Much of the time it centres around the belief that “If this story was about Party Y rather than Party X you’d be covering it in a different way”, and that’s a hard assertion to back up because it’s based on an assumption rather than an empirical, demonstrable reality – it’s rare that two parties or two politicians ever find themselves in completely comparable situations.

So we’re very grateful to the good people of the Herald this week for kindly providing us with an eye-opening illustration of what happens when they do.

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