Rhodri Morgan, Labour former First Minister of Wales, 12 December 2013:
“No reform to the Barnett Formula until after the Scottish referendum.”
Alistair Carmichael, Lib Dem Secretary of State for Portsmouth, 17 December 2013:
“This government is not going to touch the Barnett Formula.”
Our emphasis both times. It’s not too tricky to read between the lines, is it?
Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).
It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.
So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.
There’s a rather strange article by Peter Kellner, CEO of polling company YouGov, in today’s Guardian. It makes a whole series of dubious claims, one of the most startling being the assertion that “Labour is the pro-welfare party-of-the-heart”, a view somewhat at odds with the party’s stated intent to be “tougher than the Tories on benefits”.
But perhaps most curious of all was the piece’s strapline.
Because the idea that Labour was winning any battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over public-sector cuts was quite dramatically contradicted the very same day by some data released by… YouGov.
We haven’t done a “We said, he said” argument transcript for months and months, because as a rule they’re of extremely limited interest to anyone outside the political nerdosphere who isn’t familiar with the people involved.
But you don’t need any background to follow this one. So buckle up and do your best to wade past the obvious personal antagonism, because you won’t get a better illustration of the tortured mental twisting and squirming of the No campaign this year.
This is from today’s Guardian (our emphasis):
Now that’s odd. How would this spokesman know that, given that the UK government refuses to release details of what it’s spending on the anti-independence campaign? If we send in another FOI request claiming to be a No supporter, will we get an answer this time? Maybe we should give it a try.
We’ve only corrected one paragraph in the following otherwise-verbatim story from today’s Daily Record, so that it now says what it actually means rather than the paraphrased family-newspaper version. Can any eagle-eyed readers spot it?
The Huffington Post, 15 December 2013:
This, remember, is after a summer in which the nation’s political commentators almost universally agreed that Miliband’s conference promise of an energy price freeze and subsequent talk of a cost-of-living crisis was winning the hearts of the country.
Last week three separate opinion polls showed Labour’s lead over the Tories down to a pitiful five points, despite 70% of the population saying they’d felt no benefit from Britain’s feeble economic “recovery”.
We don’t think Labour has ever sacked a leader who hadn’t contested at least one general election. Ed Miliband will lead them to the polls in 2015, and only one in five Britons thinks he’ll end up in Number 10. Don’t take our word for it. Don’t heed the experts. Don’t even examine the statistics. Listen to the people who’ll be voting.
One of the great battle cries of the No campaign is the insistence that an independent Scotland couldn’t possibly be a “land of milk and honey” (even though nobody has ever actually said that it would). You simply can’t, we’re constantly told, run a country with Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation.
That, of course, is a matter of opinion, rather dependent on what you want that country to spend its money on – it’s a lot easier to afford pensions if you haven’t spunked all your cash on a load of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.
But that’s by the by. To make a better, Nordic-style Scotland, we’re warned, we’d all have to pay much more tax, and if there’s one thing that terrifies British people beyond sanity it’s the threat of higher tax. But just for a moment, let’s assume that’s really the choice, and have a quick quiz.
The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.
Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.
Today is one of those times.
The Daily Record, 13 December 2013:
But phew – luckily, in the UK there’s always an alternative.
We got a letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office today. We opened it, read it, and – if we might paraphrase for a moment – it said we were suckers.
We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.
We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).
Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.
Don’t they?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
