Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves on Sunday Politics.
Did you spot what she got wrong, readers?
Our brain protected us from looking at the Scotsman yesterday, so it wasn’t until late last night that we noticed what we first thought must be some sort of elaborate spoof.
“Labour claim 1m may lose jobs after independence”, ran what we suspect may in the post-match analysis come to be regarded as the most deranged headline of the entire referendum campaign. There are fewer than 2.6m people working in the country altogether, which would mean Labour were threatening almost 40% of all the jobs in Scotland would be lost with a Yes vote.
It wasn’t until two thirds of the way down the article that we discovered the headline writer had in fact gotten a little carried away, and that Labour had once again just plucked the word “million” out of the air to sound scary, claiming that only “some” of the jobs were allegedly at risk.
But how many is “some”?
In today’s Scottish Sun:
There’s nothing worse for a parent than your children seeing people as foreigners. We’re sure that Ed’s Belgian father and Polish mother would agree.
Some considered thoughts on the evening’s events, then.
Yeah, nice work, Britain.
Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)
And it seems our critiques have already hit home.
While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.
We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.
But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.
On last night’s Scotland Tonight, Labour MSP Patricia Ferguson claimed that a vote for independence would put at risk Scotland’s access to over £3 billion of BBC programming. It’s a curious and illogical straw-man argument rather akin to saying that if you stop being an ice-cream man you’re not allowed to have ice-cream any more, but we’ll let that slide until another day.
£3bn sounds like quite a lot of money, so in a dull moment we thought we’d study a week’s output from BBC One, the national broadcaster’s flagship channel, and see how much of it we could bear to live without.
This morning’s Daily Mail reports that Alistair Darling has been “sidelined” by the No campaign, with Douglas Alexander drafted into his place. We’ve remarked previously on this site about our bemusement over the reverence with which Mr Alexander’s intellect is regarded by the Scottish media, and we’re none the wiser after this:
We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.
Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.
Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?
We read yesterday how Labour and the Tories have both, in rather different ways, been expressing their concern about the demographic timebomb that will affect Scotland unless it can attract a major increase in immigration.
And just a few months earlier:
“Economists believe the population needs to grow by 24,000 people a year just to keep pace with European economies. Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: ‘A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base. That is absolutely essential for the economy.”
So we’d imagine that’s always been the Labour and Tory policy, right?
Even the faithful Scottish media can scarcely rouse itself to hype up Gordon Brown’s latest lumbering “intervention” in the independence debate this morning. The Scotsman buries the story in a corner of page 5, below a big spread about the ongoing implosion of CBI Scotland, and it doesn’t make the Herald’s online front page at all.
(Indeed, even in the paper’s “Referendum News” section it’s only story #6, below the CBI, more attacks on Alistair Darling’s leadership of the No campaign and a vile piece of “FOREIGNERS!” dog-whistle politicking from Labour nonentity Gregg McClymont.)
It’s not too hard to work out why.
We’re indebted to commenter “DougtheDug” on A Sair Fecht for spotting this one. On Tuesday in the House of Commons section 30 debate, Labour MP Ian Davidson bitterly attacked the Scottish Government for allegedly timing the independence referendum to coincide – at least to within six months – with the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn. (Ignoring the fact that the referendum would have happened years ago had it not been vigorously opposed and blocked by Labour.)
Davidson claimed that the timing amounted to “celebrating the murder of hundreds or thousands of English people“, and accused the SNP of exploiting anti-English sentiment for “partisan advantage”. It was a contemptible enough piece of dog-whistle politics in its own right, but all the more extraordinarily hypocritical in the light of this:
Lurking in the Westminster archives is an Early Day Motion from late 2003, in which Mr Davidson was happy to attach his name to a Parliamentary celebration – tabled by the Conservative MP for Romford, Andrew Rosindell – of what we presume we must call “the murder of hundreds or thousands of French and Spanish people”.
We must admit, we’re a little confused. Apparently openly and explicitly rejoicing at the historic deaths of enemy troops is fine if you’re a British nationalist, but disgusting, racist political chicanery if you’re a Scottish one (even when you’re not actually doing it). Can anyone point us at the rulebook for this sort of thing?
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
