Wings Over Scotland

It’s been fascinating to watch the media slyly turning Chris and Colin Weir’s quite understandable objection to being defamed by loathsome right-wing newspapers and MSPs into an attack on “cybernats”.

But this morning Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph – who we rarely read even for laughs now, so far gone is his grasp on reality – added a particularly deft twist which we thought worthy of note for those who like to study how the press does its business.

And yes, we entirely meant that double entendre.

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Alert readers will have noticed that we’ve been studying the UK government’s latest independence paper today. The 24-page booklet comes with a foreword from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth promising that it contains “the positive case for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom”, so we thought it’d be fun to share some of our favourite snippets of positivity.

We could do with some cheering up.

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The Scotland Office has today released yet another taxpayer-funded (though we’re not allowed to know how much) document about how rubbish and useless Scotland is. Issued in the name of Alistair Carmichael, it reheats and repeats all the same lines from the previous papers, but this time dumbed down a bit for thickos.

You’d think that having been churning out the same thing for two years, the UK government would have at least managed to get its story straight by now.

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For your licence fee today:

The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. Quoted For Truth Extra
The first defection to Yes from inside “Better Together” itself.

2. The talk of the town
What Alex Salmond really said to GQ, stripped of media hysteria.

3. What an arsehole looks like
Vile taxpayer-funded scumbag repeatedly abuses decent citizens in public.

4. Character assassination
Journalism, as imagined by a petulant six-year-old.

5. Look away now
Massive story almost totally and inexplicably ignored.

This week’s theme: not pretending any more.

The Sunday Mail has a surprisingly low-key piece today about a new opinion poll commissioned by the paper through the little-known pollster Progressive Partnership (who aren’t a member of the British Polling Council) and conducted by YouGov.

Oddly, it seems to have produced two very different sets of results.

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This morning’s Sunday Herald carries a typically sour and sneery quote from “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall in response to a Yes Scotland release of financial data relating to its campaign funding:

“No-one would criticise the Weirs, who are ­longstanding SNP supporters. However, it is extraordinary that compared to the tens of thousands of small donations received by Better Together, almost 80% of Yes Scotland’s money comes from one source.

We now know why they have been hiding their donations for so long.”

Firstly, of course, he might want to revise that opening sentence, since his campaign’s representative Alex Johnstone MSP seems quite unable to stop criticising the Weirs, repeatedly painting them as gullible and dishonest dupes of the evil Alex Salmond.

But as usual, Mr McDougall’s obnoxious bluster also conceals a cynical misdirection.

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Better Together co-ordinator defects to Labour For Independence

With just over four months to go until the referendum, a disillusioned Better Together campaign co-ordinator has defected to Labour For Independence and declared his support for a Yes vote on September 18th.

Gary Wilson, a Labour Party member, was for six months the local “Better Together” co-ordinator within the Edinburgh East Labour Party.

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We apologise on all sorts of levels.

There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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There’s not been much happening in the news today, folks, but luckily an alert reader came to the rescue with a story from the Financial Times that had slipped past us and which we have the oddest sensation the Scottish press won’t pick up either.

“Ireland’s long-term borrowing costs have fallen below those of the UK for the first time in six years in the latest sign of the remarkable turnround in the eurozone, which just two years ago seemed on the verge of break-up.”

Ireland, of course, was in a far deeper financial hole than resource-rich, wealthy Scotland could ever conceivably find itself in. Yet after just six short years it’s already seen as a safer credit risk than the UK.

We’re told that Scotland couldn’t afford to service its debt because the cost of borrowing would be too high. We’re told that a Sterling currency union couldn’t work because it would be like the disastrous Eurozone, yet the Eurozone has weathered the most extraordinary fiscal storms – again fiercer than anything the extremely similar economies of Scotland and the rUK could ever produce – and bounced right back.

But one after another, every Unionist scare story turns out to be drivel. With the UK government having already admitted this week that pensions are safe too, we’re not sure what there is left to be frightened of.

David Cameron tells the nation on this morning’s BBC News that the Conservatives are the party for those who want Britain out of the EU.

Curiously, in England this statement is meant as a vote-winner. Each to their own.