Wings Over Scotland

As we browsed the print edition of the Daily Record today to compare its coverage of the latest independence referendum donations news with the online version (with particular regard to Kevin McKidd), we spotted something else curious.

We’ve already noted a curious hypocrisy in the Scotsman’s reporting of the same issue this morning, where it pointedly questioned whether the SNP had handed over some sizeable donations to the party to the Yes campaign, while allowing Blair McDougall to make a virtue out of the fact that Labour and the Conservatives hadn’t transferred party funds to the No campaign. But the Record’s arithmetic is even more confused than the Scotsman’s logic.

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And we’ll give you a clue – the thing we’re in, we’re in it without a paddle.

The above is a graph released by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, invariably described as a “respected” economic research organisation of no particular political leaning. It’s an analysis of the likely impact of the coalition’s tax and welfare “reforms” on various demographic groups over the period of the current government.

It takes a moment’s study to make sense of (and it’s by far the most accessible thing they publish, though if you’re an economics whiz you can find all sorts of detailed cleverclogs stuff on their website), so we’ll quickly take you through a few bullet points.

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When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

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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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The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

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Well, this is odd.

“A recovery in North Sea oil and gas investment is set to generate £100bn of economic stimulus and hand the Chancellor a £25bn bonus through extra tax receipts, new figures showed on Monday.”
(The Telegraph, 25 February 2013)

“An independent Scotland would begin with a £4 billion black hole in its finances due to a fall in oil revenues, UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said yesterday.”
(The Scotsman, 2 March 2013)

Looks like that Reverse Perception Field at the border is still working, then.

Wings Over Scotland readership stats for February. Click to size-up.

Bullet points below for fans of blatant self-aggrandisement.

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The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:

“Blair Jenkins, the campaign’s chief executive, published [Yes To A Just Scotland] hours after suffering an embarrassing defeat in a mock referendum at Glasgow University, where students rejected independence by a margin of two to one.”

Actual result of referendum: 62-38, a margin of 1.6/1.

Size of Mr Johnson’s casual exaggeration: 25%. (1.6 x 1.25 = 2)

But seriously, though – what is it about believing in the Union that apparently renders educated people suddenly unable to count? We have no idea, but it may go some way to explaining the UK’s credit-rating downgrade.

In coverage of the latest Ipsos-MORI Scottish Public Opinion Monitor poll, the media will likely focus as usual on the not-particularly-dramatic headline figures, showing a welcome but not enormously relevant (so far away from the vote) swing of 3.5% to Yes. What we find much more interesting is the data a couple of pages down.

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We’ve had quite a jolt this afternoon, readers. The New Statesman has just posted a story proclaiming itself “Britain’s biggest political website”, citing impressive figures of 1.15 million unique users per month and 3.35m pageviews.

We clicked on the story (from a tweet) because we thought there must have been a typo – 1.15m is close to 40 times as many readers as Wings Over Scotland, yet 3.35m pageviews is only about four times what we get. But the story backed up the numbers, and provided a few more for comparison:

New Statesman: 1.15m users, 3.35m views per month
Guido Fawkes: 468K users, 2.34m views
The Spectator: 350K users, 2.5m views
Iain Dale’s Diary: 235K users, 409K views

These are the sites suggested by TNS as the UK political blogosphere’s big hitters, along with some others it didn’t give figures for. But that wasn’t what had us rubbing our eyes and doing a double-take.

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The Telegraph’s crotchety old relic Alan Cochrane is usually a figure of comic fun for independence supporters. But now and again the Tory dinosaur’s prehistoric polemic conceals something more dangerous. In a misguided attempt to add hard numbers to a piece yesterday reporting Teresa May’s speech about spies, Cochrane seems to have used Wikipedia for some information on Swedish and Danish domestic intelligence services and come up with this:

“For instance, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, which is part of the country’s police force, has 650 officers. Sweden, which is not a member of Nato, has over 1,000 officers in its security, counter terrorism and intelligence service – SAPO – which has an annual budget, according to one estimate, of £800 million.”

“According to one estimate”? That’s an interesting choice of words. Unfortunately someone wasn’t reading closely enough. Wikipedia’s English-language page on Säpo does indeed say that it had a budget of around 800m in 2008. Except it wasn’t £800m, but 800 million Swedish Kronor. At today’s exchange rate that’s around £80 million. Mr Cochrane has, in his fury, overstated Sweden’s intelligence budget by 1,000%. Oops.

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We’re not going to link to the Brian Wilson article which the Guardian unaccountably lowered itself to publishing yesterday. It’s embarrassing to see a still-widely-respected newspaper debasing its pages with the sort of swivel-eyed ranting you’d normally expect from a drunk shouting at a skip at 7am, which we can only assume the paper paid money for after LabourHame rejected it as being just too bitter and deranged.

One ugly little piece of innuendo is worth picking up on, though. With what’s the closest thing to subtlety in the piece, Wilson grudgingly concedes the SNP’s mandate to hold an independence referendum:

“The difference is that Scotland now has to answer a question which only a minority want to ask: ‘Should Scotland become an independent country?’ This is because, two years ago, 21% of Scots voted nationalist in the Holyrood elections, giving them an overall majority.”

Even in that tiny snippet there are several nasty little lies (nobody voted “nationalist”, for example – they voted for the SNP, which stands for Scottish National Party rather than Nationalist, and many did so despite opposing independence, just as tens of thousands of “nationalists” voted for other parties). But we’ll focus on the “21%” thing.

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