Despite the strikingly unequivocal nature of David Trimble’s clarification yesterday of his comments about the independence referendum’s potential impact on Northern Irish politics, remarkably the media are today still trying to spin them into a dire warning about a Yes vote causing renewed violence in the province.
The picture below is a page from this morning’s Sunday Times.
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Tags: misinformation, project fear
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
Our attention was drawn this weekend to a survey conducted by the Scottish Chambers of Commerce, which polled 759 Scottish businesses of various sizes about a number of issues relating to independence.
It doesn’t seem to have had a great deal of coverage, perhaps because most of the answers were in the “bleeding obvious” category – business frets about change, and the more change there might be the less they like it.
One set of figures did catch our eye, though.
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Category
analysis, psephology, scottish politics
We’ve quite frequently highlighted the ugly, irresponsible tone of the No campaign’s – and especially Labour’s – comments about “foreigners” in the independence debate. And the reason we do is because that sort of language feeds attitudes like these.
There is, sadly, more where that came from.
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Tags: britnats, unionist of the day
Category
comment, culture, disturbing, scottish politics, scum
A reader this morning pointed us to an article by the arch-Unionist blogger and pundit Professor Adam Tomkins, who we must once again emphasise in the interests of clarity is almost definitely NOT the gentleman in this picture:
It was a piece from a few weeks ago about the currency debate, which the reader felt made a reasonable and “quite convincing” case, so we went and had a look.
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Category
analysis, reference, scottish politics, uk politics
As people who commission opinion polls occasionally, a thing that puzzles us is why other people who do it ask questions and then don’t talk about the results.
Some polls are done with the intention of being for private consumption only (this is particularly true when they’re commissioned by one side or the other in a debate, rather than by a notionally-impartial newspaper or the pollster themselves), and at other times results will be kept private because the results are unfavourable to the people who commissioned them.
(For the avoidance of doubt, we’ve never withheld any results for that reason.)
But at other times, results will be published but never discussed. Which is why, whenever a poll’s just come out these days, we get ourselves straight over to the polling company’s website and see what’s been left out.
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Tags: project fear
Category
analysis, comment, psephology, scottish politics
Because this is how a state broadcaster does balanced, impartial reporting.
Now some revision notes to help you.
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Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, video
Just magnificent work from the Daily Mail today.
Really only a couple of tiny quibbles.
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Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, stats
Today has seen the entry into the independence debate of the magnificently batty Vote No Borders campaign group – not on any account to be confused with the No Borders campaign group, whose aims are to “struggle against borders and immigration controls and strive for freedom of movement for all” and are therefore the very antithesis of what the British state has increasingly come to stand for.
Various puff pieces in the media have given the group free space to advertise themselves as a “grassroots” campaign that is non-party political. But the funding figures mentioned – £150,000 raised before the group had any kind of public profile at all and hope of raising another £250,000 on top – may well cause more cynical readers to detect a somewhat piscine odour.
As we’ve got our journalism hats on, let’s have a sniff.
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Tags: Douglas Daniel
Category
analysis, investigation, scottish politics
Yesterday, we discovered a rather curious anti-independence “listicle” on the popular viral-meme website Buzzfeed. Entitled “Scotland. The UK. 10 Myths. 10 Facts.”, it describes itself as “myth busting” by an author identified only as “YouDecide2014”.
It was shared or retweeted by a variety of Conservative Party special advisers, the 10 Downing Street Facebook account, and even the UK Ministry of Defence.
The crude, extremely biased article gives no indication that it’s written by the UK government. The closest it comes to doing so is right at the end, where it says “Get the facts at www.gov.uk/scottishreferendum“. The Buzzfeed account page makes no reference to the UK government, and the layout makes the piece look like any normal article on the site, although in fact it’s posted on Buzzfeed Community, which is an area where users can post anything they want to without censorship.
We decided to find out more.
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Tags: Alistair Davidson, hypocrisy
Category
analysis, disturbing, investigation, scottish politics, uk politics
