Wings Over Scotland

For some reason the Unionist community has this week been turning the bullhorn up to maximum on the subject of pensions. Most likely provoked by the publication of Dr Craig Dalzell’s fascinating “Beyond GERS”, the usual suspects have returned to the scaremongering tactics deployed during the indyref, attempting to terrorise the elderly with blood-curdling threats of destitution once again.

It’s a bewildering approach, given that the situation regarding pensions is one of the few around independence about which there is known certainty. The UK government already pays the state pension to millions of people outside the UK, under rules which would apply in exactly the same way if Scotland became a “foreign” country.

But just for fun, let’s look at exactly what the situation would be in the monumentally implausible event that Blair McDougall was telling the truth for once.

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Readers of this site will be well aware of the many failings and limitations of GERS, aka Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland – the document which serves as the informal accounts of a devolved Scotland but tells us next to nothing about the finances of an independent Scotland, as noted just a few weeks ago by the impartial multinational auditors Deloitte.

An article I produced this week for the Common Weal White Paper Project – Beyond GERS – has generated much critical response from Unionists, though some of it has at least been constructive.

Spurred on by the mention of the article by David Torrance in Monday’s Herald, in a column containing several serious inaccuracies, I’ve seen various misunderstandings and misconceptions about it which ought to be addressed.

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We haven’t dignified the current media-imagined “crisis” in Scotland’s railways with coverage thus far, for obvious reasons, but it seemed worth briefly letting someone much better qualified to comment than us bring some perspective to the issue.

(From today’s Herald. Click to enlarge.)

Readers might well feel justified in wondering why it wasn’t until someone took it upon themselves to go to the trouble of writing to a newspaper, after days of sustained press hysteria, that some sane and balanced commentary on the situation appeared. But then again, if Mr Docherty’s expert opinion had been sought in the first place, we wouldn’t have been able to have a solid week of “SNP BAD” all over the airwaves.

One of the videos below is a genuine “Better Together” campaign broadcast, pulled from TV at the last minute (despite costing £50,000 to make) and today revealed by Buzzfeed. The other is a spoof we made in June 2014.

Good luck figuring out which is the real one, folks.

Namely, that of a 100%-certain victory in indyref 2:

We might take the rest of the day off to celebrate.

As alert readers will know, one of the primary purposes of this website isn’t just to tell people when the Scottish and UK media is lying to them, but to teach readers how to spot that for themselves. And one of the keys to learning that is to ask yourself what a story in the press is leaving out as well as what it’s telling you.

So last week, when several newspapers went on an orgy of shock-horror reporting about SNP MPs’ expenses – focusing mostly on aeroplane flights and only quoting figures for a small handful of MPs who’d allegedly been claiming far more taxpayers’ money than their Unionist predecessors – alarm bells started ringing everywhere.

And just as we’ve taught them to, Wings readers leapt into action to do the hard work that Scotland’s professional journalists don’t want to do, in order to provide Scots with the facts that the media doesn’t want them to know.

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This article by US writer Emily Robinson is probably more instructive than anything we could post today (the Sunday papers are a news desert again, frankly). It doesn’t take a very great feat of imagination to transpose the American terms to Scottish ones – for “Berniebros” read “cybernats”, etc. Phantom news, it seems, is universal.

Nobody could ever accuse the Scottish press of underpromoting its grievances – alert readers will still recall, for example, the long procession of articles with near-identical content in the Daily Mail last year about SNP MPs and their “second jobs”. For 2016, though, the media’s obsessive repeating of the exact same story every few weeks has manifested itself over Nat members’ expenses.

So let’s take a quick look.

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Can be half-full or half-empty. Neither of the stories below is untrue.

Readers can make their own judgements on the Scottish Daily Mail’s agenda.

There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.

It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.

This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:

Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.

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One of our favourite things to remember is what Scottish Labour regional manager Kezia Dugdale said when she was elected to the head-of-branch post 15 months ago:

We like to periodically check how that’s going.

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