Wings Over Scotland

Our poll story yesterday was a pretty interesting piece of politics news considering it’s the Christmas dead season. We put an interesting new angle on the independence question, and posted all the poll data so that reporters had plenty to get their teeth into. And we released it at lunchtime so they had plenty of time to get it into today’s editions.

Remarkably, though, none of the Scottish media – with the honourable exception of The National, who made it their front page splash – thought that the best numbers for independence in many months merited even a dismissive passing mention. Scotland’s political hacks doggedly ignored it on social media. And then things got weird.

The tweet above appeared briefly – having been posted at 11.44am it was gone by no later than 12.10pm – on the Twitter account of the Herald. The story it linked to cannot be found through the paper’s website, though it’s still hidden away on the servers.

(Its sister paper the Evening Times carried the story, then outright deleted it.)

And the reason why provides a fascinating insight into how the press operates.

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Now don’t get us wrong, readers. We’re sure that gormless Tory MP Ross Thomson is not, repeat NOT, permanently binned off his tulips on methamphetamine. He just has an unfortunate habit of photographing that way.

So when an alert reader sent us a link this morning to an extraordinary interview in which the Brexiteer claimed to have “killed indyref 2” in 2017, we didn’t automatically dismiss it as the drug-addled rantings of an ego-crazed madman.

Instead, we thought we’d check for signs of life.

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A very Merry Christmas to our old pal Michelle – sorry, Lady – Mone.

We’re sure that’s some sort of giant cabbage in the picture or something.

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Readers, meet Eric Simpson.

He’s a fervent Tory, and the Secretary of Inverurie Community Council. He tweets as “ElginLoon59”, and as a busy pillar of the local community he’s got some pretty firm views on the sort of people who should and shouldn’t hold public office.

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Today, on the shortest day of the worst year in recent memory, the people of Catalonia will vote in an election under the control of a brutally repressive government which has unjustly dissolved their devolved parliament, imprisoned their democratically-elected leaders, viciously beaten hundreds of voters for no crime other than trying  to vote, and banned almost all types of expression of public support for Catalan independence, including outlawing colours of the rainbow.

All this has happened within the borders of civilised free Europe, and the other nations of that great continent have largely either turned a blind eye to Catalonia’s suffering, or actively sided with the Spanish regime. Many people fear that today’s election will be rigged, or that if pro-independence parties win the result will simply be ignored and the election re-run until the “right” result is arrived at.

The UK media has barely acknowledged the election is taking place, even though it appears that many of the most cherished and fundamental human rights and freedoms of the West are at stake in it. (Or perhaps precisely for that reason.)

For members of peaceful self-determination movements across the world, including in Scotland, the stakes could barely be higher. Madrid has demonstrated in the starkest possible terms that power devolved is power retained, and events in Barcelona today could be events in Edinburgh tomorrow.

(And if that seems overly melodramatic, ask yourself who would ever have imagined a 21st-century democracy sending in riot police, in full view of the eyes of the world, to literally drag blood-soaked elderly women out of polling stations by the hair?)

All we can do is watch and hope that justice prevails, and that the darkest hours do prove to be those that come before a bright new dawn.

Yesterday we brought you news of the Scottish Mail On Sunday’s deep concern that the new Scottish budget might cost wealthy old people cashing in a £600,000 pension pot as one lump sum as much as £3,000 in extra tax. It was a heart-rending tale, but today we have one even more harrowing.

That’s our old Scotland In Union pal Merryn Somerset Webb writing in “the UK’s best-selling financial magazine” Money Week, and she was furious.

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The Scottish press and opposition have had it in for the baby box ever since the idea was mooted, but this is a pretty spectacular new low in barrel-scraping.

“Almost half”, eh? How many are we talking about exactly?

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This week’s Scottish budget threw the opposition parties and the media into panic and disarray. Evidently having expected considerably more swingeing tax hikes than the extremely modest increases that were imposed on higher earners, they’d built up a head of steaming fury that had nowhere to go, and have been reduced to frantically scrabbling around for extreme (or flat-out wrong) examples to try to generate outrage.

Today’s politics lead in the Scottish Mail On Sunday is a case in point.

By going through all the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, the SMoS has managed to pick out a tiny anomaly around National Insurance thresholds, and portrayed it as hitting people on a very healthy but not exactly super-rich salary of £45,000 with a total tax-and-NI rate of 53%.

The small print, as ever, is rather less dramatic.

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(Just 24 hours left to buy cartoon books for your friends in time for Christmas! Hurry!)
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Because to tell you the truth, readers, we’re not sure the word “idiot” is accurate any more. The tweets you’re about to read are far beyond simple stupidity and well into the shadowy realms of deliberate falsehood. (Delivered in the secure knowledge that the media won’t challenge it, and in fact will probably exaggerate and amplify it further.)

So let’s start with one of the better-known dum-dums.

That’s serial bonehead Jamie Greene there, demonstrating that he can’t count up to two, because what he evidently meant to write was “two pictures say eleven words”.

This should be good.

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The Tories kicked off yesterday’s reaction to the budget with a straight-up lie.

No promise has been broken. The basic rate HAS been frozen, at 20p, and low and middle earners HAVE been protected. Nobody who’s on less than £33,000 – which is considerably higher than the average (£23K) or full-time median (£28K) wages – will pay a penny more tax, and the large majority of Scots will in fact see a small tax cut.

(The weasel-wording justification is of course that pretty much everyone who pays tax pays some of it at the basic rate, and are therefore in a sense “basic-rate taxpayers”. But “nobody will pay any more tax” wasn’t the promise. Indeed, the manifesto pledge is a pretty clear implication that better-off people WOULD be taxed a little more.)

But the numbering was interesting. In order to try to obscure that fact that most Scots would be paying LESS tax as a result of the budget, the Tories went with a nicely vague but high-sounding “hundreds of thousands” for the number of people who’d lose out a little. And then the Scottish media went to work.

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