Phoebe Arnold on BuzzFeed Politics, 6 August 2014:
(Source fullfact.org. Our emphasis.)
£222bn divided by 33 years is £6.73bn a year. No biggie. Don’t mention it.
…for us off their own bat this week, unasked. It’s pretty awesome, though we haven’t the slightest idea what we could use it for. (What it really makes us want is a snazzy 1cm-thick cutout metal version of the logo to use as a poker guard. Anyone?)
But when we have our own nightly current-affairs TV show on an independent Scottish Broadcasting Service, it looks like the intro is pretty much sorted. 🙂
Supporters of independence are often accused of a certain degree of paranoia when it comes to their lack of trust in the Scottish and UK media.
The above chart is from the latest European Quality Of Life Survey, conducted by an EU agency with the unwieldy but self-explanatory name of The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, (Eurofound for short).
It’s a wide-ranging study with a variety of very interesting findings, but one of the most striking is the almost unique and near-pathological lack of trust in the media held by the UK public. With the exception of Greece, every other nation on the continent has considerably more faith in its press.
It’s not just a cynical British nature – trust in the Parliament and the legal system(s) here are much healthier in comparison to other European nations, but the people of Britain don’t trust their media as far as they could throw it. (Perhaps astonishingly, UK citizens trust politicians significantly MORE than they trust newspapers.)
It’s not just us, readers.
Readers of this site may remember the story published on the BBC earlier this week, where the figures for GDP per capita miraculously switched overnight from showing Scotland as a net contributor to the UK to implying that Scotland was a net recipient.
And after reviewing the data posted by the BBC, it appears that the export figures have also been massaged to imply that Scotland exports vastly less than it does in reality.
There’s an article on the BBC website today with the self-explanatory title of “Scottish independence: How would the UK fare without Scotland?”
On the left is what it said yesterday (that losing Scotland would be bad for the UK). On the right is what it says today (that losing Scotland would be good for the UK).
Does anyone know what calamity befell Scotland’s economy overnight?
We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.
We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.
The Daily Record has a new poll from Survation today, with the same razor’s-edge findings as their last one. With don’t-knows excluded, the vote is poised at 47 Yes 53 No, which is statistically a dead heat (as polls of this size have a 3% margin of error).
The paper oddly chooses to lead not on the headline figure but on a finding which shows one in five Scots have had an argument with a friend or family member over independence, which seems a remarkably low figure to us in the circumstances. But the thing that made us smile was the analysis of the poll by Scotland’s Only Living Psephologist, the esteemed Professor John Curtice.
The two arguments heard most often from voters who are leaning towards No (that is, discounting the diehard BritNats who’d vote for the Union no matter what) are “we need more facts” and “we’d like Scotland to be independent but there wouldn’t be the money to pay for it and we don’t want to have higher taxes”.
The first of those is a red herring, successfully propagated by the No campaign with the willing assistance of the media in order to create doubt and fear. There are, by definition, no such things as “facts” about the future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, regardless of whether Scotland votes Yes or No.
The next Westminster election, for example, could easily see the UK vote to leave the European Union by 2017, a change which would beyond question be far more dramatic and disastrous than any plausible outcome of Scottish independence.
The second argument, though, we can do something about.
Later this morning the Queen will launch a vessel named after herself at the Rosyth naval dockyards. Earlier, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, appeared on the BBC News channel dripping in gold braid and medals to revel in the delivery of his shiny new toy, or at least the hull of it.
(Rather crassly Sir George claimed that it was being given the name of not just the current monarch but “both our Queen Elizabeths”, even though Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elizabeth and the ship itself tactfully avoids adding a “II” on the end.)
In what was an all-round virtuoso display of foot-shooting, the esteemed Admiral was also keen to point out just how few jobs would be supported by HMS Big Grey Floating Car Park – which won’t actually carry any fighter jets until 2020 – noting that “this ship only has 600 people aboard… that is a fraction of previous vessels of this size”.
And that got us to thinking.
There’s some very strange counting going on in the Times today. Firstly the paper carries a story about a survey of potential shale gas deposits in the central belt, and arrives at a very gloomy conclusion (“Modest deposits shake hope of shale bonanza”):
Hold on a minute. We’re not fans of fracking, but 80 trillion cubic feet? If the UK uses 3 tcf of gas a year, presumably Scotland, with 8.4% of the population, uses roughly 0.25 tcf a year. 80 tcf into 0.25 tcf suggests that the shale gas thought to be in the central belt would cover Scotland’s use for 320 years, which seems quite a lot.
From yesterday’s Evening Express:
It’s probably appropriate to remember at this point that Labour have promised to be even tougher on welfare than the current coalition should they be elected in 2015. But there’s something very alarming about those stats.
It seems somehow fitting that there was a political battle in Stirling yesterday. The city was host to two sets of military-themed festivities, with the UK government having decided to hold Armed Forces Day there in a move transparently aimed at wrecking the commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn.
The anniversary was obviously on an immovable date and location, but the Labour-Tory coalition that runs Stirling Council, and which last year attempted to replace a Saltire which flies over the statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce with a Union Jack – a plan it abandoned after it was highlighted by this site – agreed to host the competing festival on the same weekend.
Armed Forces Day had free admission to undermine the relatively pricey Bannockburn event. Labour even went so far as to actively try to put people off attending the latter, with Glasgow MP Ian Davidson suggesting that the commemoration was nothing more than a glorification of “the murder of hundreds of thousands of English people”. (These particular “people” being an invading army, actual English casualties around 10,000.)
The press covered the subsequent downsizing of the historical recreation with glee, with numerous articles reporting low ticket sales and other problems right up to the eve of the show, which appeared about to be a major flop.
But then something odd happened.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
