Wings Over Scotland

The big story in UK news this morning is Ed Miliband’s statement of Labour’s position on an EU referendum. “Ed Miliband will dramatically pave way for in-out referendum on Europe if Labour come to power”, says the Mirror, while “Ed Miliband rules out EU referendum” is the Spectator’s take and the BBC goes with “Ed Miliband says Labour will not commit to EU referendum”. Ah, the media, bringing clarity as ever.

On this occasion, the right-wing magazine is closest to the truth. Miliband’s statement is about as unambiguous as Labour ever get on anything these days – “We strongly believe Britain’s future is in the EU, and my priorities for government after the next election are very different from those of the Conservatives” is pretty hard to misinterpret in the context of the Tories having expressly pledged a referendum long before their manifesto is published.

It is, in the language of politics, a “brave” move.

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If you work in the media, the great attraction of completely making up stories is that everyone’s forgotten about them a few days later, so you can make up a totally different, equally false version at a later date with impunity.

Alert readers may recall, for example, that last November much of the media decided to claim that Andy Murray was definitely a Unionist.

So naive readers might imagine that when the Wimbledon and US Open winner came out at the weekend and said that in fact he WOULDN’T be publicly revealing his view on independence after all, that might be seen as a bit of a setback to the No camp.

We know better than that, of course.

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We’ve commented before on the odd way that newspapers can reveal their bias in the way they phrase their reporting, rather than in the actual content of it, which can be entirely factually accurate. As we noted, a particular giveaway is the angle from which they view statistics, and especially opinion polls.

A poll showing 35% of people backing independence will almost always be reported as “ONLY a third back Yes”, whereas one with the exact same numbers for a different question might be presented as “OVER a third distrust Alex Salmond”. The proportion “one third” is in such a manner portrayed as being both a small and a large one, to suit whatever position the publication wishes to promote.

It’s in such a context that we invite readers to ponder today’s Mail On Sunday.

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We again commend this week’s edition of the Sunday Herald to readers as 69p (for the digital version, or whatever the physical one costs in a newsagent these days) well spent on some interesting and balanced journalism.

Iain Macwhirter’s column is a particularly good read today, unusually incendiary and impeccably argued, but the thing that most caught our eye was a nice piece of investigative reporting on a theme Wings readers will find very familiar.

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From the Norwich Evening News, 4 March 2014:

“‘It is ridiculous that independence for Scotland is even being given consideration at all.

Much blood was spilled over centuries to bring the home nations together.

It’s disrespectful to the honour of those that suffered to think that a cross on a ballot paper can undo that. National pride and patriotism is what being a Scot is all about, and there is not a nation in the world that has more of it than Scotland. We don’t need economic independence to prove it.’

Blair Ainslie is managing director of Great Yarmouth-based offshore firm Seajacks. He hails from Dunbar, East Lothian and moved south of the border in 1979.”

That one’s making our head spin.

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As we noted last week, Eton- and Sandhurst-educated Sir Norman Arthur, figurehead of the No campaign’s latest high-powered grassroots fundraising drive, has a very impressive military record – Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, Commander of the 7th Armoured Brigade, General Officer Commanding of the 3rd Armoured Division, General Officer Commanding of Scotland and mentioned in despatches during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

It’s just lucky the IRA didn’t have Twitter, or things might have been different.

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Does any of this sound familiar, readers?

“Federalists [the opponents of Quebec independence] argued that the Yes campaign’s undertakings, such as those on using the Canadian dollar and joining international organisations, were, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on the agreement of the rest of Canada, on other countries or on international organisations.

The assertion that Canada would immediately assume the obligations and rights of all Canada’s treaties and conventions was particularly controversial. The US, Canada and Mexico all stated that Quebec should not assume that entry into NAFTA would be automatic.”

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When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):

“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”

The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.

So we can just forget about it, right?

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Prominent New Labour writer Dan Hodges has a piece in the Telegraph today (because where else would a New Labour commentator have a column?) about UKIP now being an openly racist party. It contains the following passage:

“Last May Farage visited Edinburgh, where he was met by a small but aggressive mob of protesters. Eventually he had to be escorted from the scene by police for his own safety.

Directly accusing the SNP of being behind the protest, Farage described the protesters as ‘racist Nazi scum’. The incident was, he said, ‘deeply racist and displayed a total hatred of the English’.

And he’s right. He wasn’t targeted on the basis of his race, but on the basis of his nationality. And as he said, that was racist.”

We’ll leave aside that the protest was nothing to do with the SNP or Scottish nationalists, that it was organised by a radical left-wing group and that one of the two men arrested in connection with the incident was in fact English himself. None of those factual inconveniences are allowed to get in the way of Hodges’ bigotry.

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From today’s Press & Journal, for those of you outside Aberdeen.

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Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail on Wall Street Journal Live yesterday.

“I would be very surprised if at the end of the day the Scots will vote for independence. It’s a fantasy, it’s a romantic fantasy, it’s fuelled by fantasy, by resentment, by all sorts of issues.”

Shall we take five minutes out from hating the English and give her a surprise?