Wings Over Scotland

Readers, since Sunday we’ve been endeavouring on your behalf to find the elusive alleged Scottish Labour conference resolution to oppose the renewal of Trident which Neil Findlay insists is still current policy. We’ve drawn a blank, and Mr Findlay himself has been no help, telling an alert reader that:

“I can’t recall the year – it was quote [sic] some time ago but I am reliably informed it hasn’t changed since then.”

We still haven’t tracked anything down, but thanks to another alert reader we did find a fascinating piece in the archives of the Herald. We share it with you below.

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The story in yesterday’s Scotsman carrying outrageous and defamatory slurs against me has today vanished from its website. There’s nothing by way of an apology or correction in the paper’s usual page 2 corrections column, however, and there’s been no reply to either my email of yesterday morning or the letter our solicitor sent yesterday afternoon. Be assured, readers, that the matter won’t rest there.

But today things are even more interesting.

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We’ve just been watching the latest of the BBC’s big independence referendum debates, and we’d like the hour of our life we wasted back, please.

It wasn’t as though it was the worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. It was, if nothing else, relatively even-tempered, helped by some firm moderation by James Cook. Lesley Riddoch was as reliable, sensible and on top of the facts as she always is (although even we’re starting to get fed up of hearing her go on about Norway all the time). And while Brian Wilson is a dishonest and bilious wee nyaff, he does have the one huge saving grace that he isn’t Anas Sarwar.

But tell us this, readers – what was the point of it all?

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Readers who may have been alarmed that the Scotsman hadn’t run any Michael Kelly columns for a while can breathe a sigh of relief this morning, as the role of “clueless idiot blithely spouting inflammatory and wrong-headed drivel about sectarianism and independence” is clearly in safe hands.

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Heavens above, readers. Immersing ourselves as we do in the tepid and murky waters of Scottish political journalism for a living – because it was either that or drowning kittens in a bucket and the hours for that are slightly unsociable – we sometimes imagine that we’ve become inured to even the most fatuously cretinous word-vomiting arse-quackery that passes for analysis in the supposedly intelligent press.

And then we read something like the spectacularly, cosmically moronic mind-sewage Hamish Macdonell just strained and heaved onto the electro-pages of the Spectator this afternoon and realise that the abyss of idiocy has no end, or at the very least culminates in a black-hole singularity from which the light of reason can never escape.

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We’ve just watched three hours of the Education and Culture Committee at Holyrood discussing the report on media bias by Professor John Robertson of the University of the West of Scotland, which featured the good professor himself and senior BBC Scotland executives including Ken McQuarrie and John Boothman.

The contrast between Prof. Robertson’s absolute frankness and candour – openly discussing his political views and his mild autism – and the BBC men’s evasion and obfuscation was quite something to behold. We’ll have some analysis this week.

One finding of Prof. Robertson’s report was that the anti-independence media (or for short, “the media”) had a strong tendency to personalise the Yes debate in the form of Alex Salmond, and a piece in today’s Scotsman provides us with a handy illustration.

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It’s always nice when the Scottish media takes the time to illustrate one of our points for us. Earlier this week we attempted to distil this site’s core work of the last two years into two simple rules, elegantly pictured below.

Imagine our unrestricted delight, then, when this weekend’s Scotland On Sunday chose to generously provide us with some prima facie evidence of the phenomenon.

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(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)

We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.

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Let’s start with a bang, then.

Since nobody wants to define devo-max and the parties of the Union won’t let anyone vote for it anyway (preferring the “Oh, we’ll sort it out for you later, just trust us” argument they so often berate the SNP for), the independence referendum has a great big hole in it where a very substantial proportion of the population would like to be.

So while the press constantly talks about “more powers” (and repeats the falsehood that the London parties are committed to them) without ever saying what the phrase means, and as Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems frantically evade even making solid promises to think about them in the event of a No vote, we thought we’d cut straight to the chase and ask the Scottish people what they wanted.

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This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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Readers will be aware that while we still link to articles in the Scotsman, we rarely encourage anyone to read pieces by Brian Wilson or Michael Kelly. Both generally issue furious, barely-coherent rants consumed by a blind, absolute tribal hatred of anything in any way connected to the SNP and/or independence, and amount to little more than professional trolling.

We’re not going to make an exception for Wilson’s latest, a spittle-flecked diatribe (fuelled by the Scotsman’s favourite useful idiot Jim Sillars) about how the idea that an independent Scotland could have an open border with the rUK is “ridiculous”, and that there would have to be border controls and passport checks. If you really want to read it you can go and find it for yourself.

But we thought it might be interesting to see if we could find a couple of comparable neighbouring countries (eschewing the obvious example of Ireland, which is for some reason apparently invisible to Unionists) and see how they handled it.

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We’ve spent a fair bit of time over the course of this website’s existence documenting the multi-media witch-hunts that invariably arise in the Scottish media whenever some obscure and/or anonymous independence supporter on the internet says something slightly intemperate (or even just expresses an unpopular opinion).

We especially enjoy contrasting it against the way that the elected, taxpayer-funded representatives of major political parties can get away unremarked with comparing the First Minister to dictators and genocidal mass murderers (of the sort “Better Together” donors like to give hundreds of thousands of pounds to).

The vast difference in the amount of media weight given to abusive behaviour from British nationalists and that from the independence side (the infamous “cybernats”) has long been a feature of Scottish political debate, but over the last 12 hours the phenomenon has seen an intriguing new twist.

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