This is Lord (Ian) Lang of Monkton (Conservative) speaking in the House Of Lords on the 6th of September 2011, during the second Lords reading of the Scotland Bill (later to become the Scotland Act 2012):
And there’s more.
Just for laughs, we thought we’d have a look on the BBC website this morning for some intelligent, detailed analysis of yesterday’s devolution proposals from the Conservatives. Yeah, we know. We must still be a bit drunk from last night.
Not only is there not a single mention of the Strathclyde Commission report in the headlines (which do find room to report the line-up of a book festival in Nairn coincidentally featuring a number of BBC presenters, and the hot news that Roy Keane will NOT be the next manager of Celtic, although neither he nor Celtic had ever said he would), but on digging down into the dedicated referendum section we found something more disturbing.
As we forced ourselves unwillingly through the full text of the Strathclyde Commission report in the name of professionalism this afternoon, it struck us that perhaps in our partisan haste we’d been just a tiny bit harsh on it.
After all, while the extension of tax powers is at best an empty charade and at worst an expensive millstone around the neck of the Scottish Government’s budget, and the proposals for devolving elements of welfare vague and highly unlikely to ever be implemented, there are a couple of recommendations that would, while minor in the context of Holyrood’s overall finances, at least be welcome.
Something nagged at the back of our mind, though.
The Strathclyde Commission report, 15 months in the making and repeatedly delayed, is just 16 pages long. We’re not too sure what the team did for 14 months and three weeks of that time, because in essence the report is the executive summary of Scottish Labour’s “Powers For A Purpose” paper with a couple of numbers changed.
(Luckily they’re fantasy numbers that won’t affect anything, as the powers they refer to can never be used and in fact will be delivered by the Scotland Act 2012 anyway.)
So rather than bore you by going through it making all the same arguments that we made about the Labour report again, we’re going to keep it short.
This morning’s papers are already full of reports about the contents of the Strathclyde Commission report, the Conservative counterpart to Labour’s shambolic “Devo Nano” proposals. Embarrassingly for Johann Lamont, it looks as though the Tories are going to “outbid” Labour, the self-proclaimed “party of devolution”, with what are superficially greater powers for the Scottish Parliament on taxation.
And like much of the media’s coverage of the entire independence debate, the reporting to date is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Scotland.
The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.
1. An actual letter from America
A fresh perspective on NATO and nukes.
2. The news less fit to print
The media tries to pretend there isn’t a blue whale in the room.
3. Unrestricted warfare
Just your standard No camp make-people-think-their-child-will-die stuff.
4. A day of shame
On which we learned that 10% = 30% and 4 = 1.
5. Friends and enemies
Anas Sarwar claims the BNP and Britain First for team-mates.
This week’s theme: spin so intense it alters gravity.
We’ve been toasting in the sun with the Wings Emergency Kitten most of today, readers, celebrating the fact that Wings Over Scotland now has more unique readers per month than the sales of any Scottish newspaper.
(As of May we’re reaching 253,000 people monthly, whereas the best-selling paper, the Scottish Sun, shifts 248,000 copies. It is, of course, a ridiculously unfair comparison for all sorts of reasons, but it’s still nice as a purely symbolic milestone.)
Even so, when an alert reader sent us a picture of today’s Scottish Sunday Express we wondered if we might have baked our brains a bit too much, because it carried a feature about something that we didn’t remember doing at all.
Readership stats for May, if you like that sort of thing.
We spend a lot of time on this site pulling the Scottish media up on its many and abysmal failings, so it’s only fair that when it occasionally gets something (largely) right we should offer it a little bit of praise and recognition.
And for once we’re not even being sarcastic when we say that, so let’s have a round of only slightly muted applause for this week’s Scottish Sun.
We don’t have the faintest idea what effect (if any) the Tory-millionaire-run “Vote No Borders” campaign might be having on the general public, but for those of us analysing the referendum campaign it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Whether it’s the extremely suspicious nature of its funding, its employees airbrushing their CVs to remove any mention of ever working for it or the unashamedly blatant misinformation it’s been pumping out remorselessly over a wide range of subjects, it looks increasingly like a very expensive attempt to make “Better Together” appear moderate, reasonable and likeable by comparison.
Last night, in response to a media furore ignited by Wings Over Scotland’s revelation that it had pulled a cinema ad about the NHS after angry complaints from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the group finally published an extraordinary, sour and petulant official statement about the incident. As far as apologies go, we think it’s fair to say it leaves something to be desired.
It’s well worth a breakdown.
We’re not sure if these are Scottish Labour’s 3rd-floor office-mates at John Smith House, or just some of the party’s alternative trading names.
The week-long media frenzy that would have surrounded the Scottish Government releasing a key set of figures about independence, only to have them immediately and pointedly disowned by their cited sources as gross distortions misrepresenting the reality by a factor of 12, doesn’t bear thinking about.
(Remind yourself of the 10 desperate days they dragged out of some spectacularly innocuous comments about Vladimir Putin and multiply that by about a thousand.)
The one-sided national embarrassment that is the Scottish media, however, has done its level best to completely bury the wholly-justified anger of Professors Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE and Robert Young of Western Ontario University.
Neither of the country’s current-affairs TV shows gave the matter more than the most cursory passing mention, nor did most of its newspapers. You’ll search in vain for a story about it in the Guardian, and the Scotsman actually managed to hide its two paragraphs of coverage deep inside pieces attacking the SNP.
A promised interview with Professor Dunleavy on “Good Morning Scotland” never materialised, but the distinguished academic DID eventually surface on Wednesday’s edition of “Newsdrive”. If you click the image above you can listen to the seven-minute slot in its entirety, and wonder just how outrageously the defenders of the Union would have to act to make the front pages of a Scottish newspaper.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
