Wings Over Scotland

The big story in UK news this morning is Ed Miliband’s statement of Labour’s position on an EU referendum. “Ed Miliband will dramatically pave way for in-out referendum on Europe if Labour come to power”, says the Mirror, while “Ed Miliband rules out EU referendum” is the Spectator’s take and the BBC goes with “Ed Miliband says Labour will not commit to EU referendum”. Ah, the media, bringing clarity as ever.

On this occasion, the right-wing magazine is closest to the truth. Miliband’s statement is about as unambiguous as Labour ever get on anything these days – “We strongly believe Britain’s future is in the EU, and my priorities for government after the next election are very different from those of the Conservatives” is pretty hard to misinterpret in the context of the Tories having expressly pledged a referendum long before their manifesto is published.

It is, in the language of politics, a “brave” move.

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Still no sign of any video despite repeated requests, but we’ve finally managed to lay our hands on an audio recording of Alex Salmond’s New Statesman lecture in London last week, including the audience question-and-answer session afterwards.

(The main speech ends at 36m, if you’ve already read it and want to get to the Q&A.)

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We’ve just watched three hours of the Education and Culture Committee at Holyrood discussing the report on media bias by Professor John Robertson of the University of the West of Scotland, which featured the good professor himself and senior BBC Scotland executives including Ken McQuarrie and John Boothman.

The contrast between Prof. Robertson’s absolute frankness and candour – openly discussing his political views and his mild autism – and the BBC men’s evasion and obfuscation was quite something to behold. We’ll have some analysis this week.

One finding of Prof. Robertson’s report was that the anti-independence media (or for short, “the media”) had a strong tendency to personalise the Yes debate in the form of Alex Salmond, and a piece in today’s Scotsman provides us with a handy illustration.

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This sort of thing just won’t do at all, STV.

Because that closing comment isn’t true, is it?

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We seem to have hit a bit of a lull in the independence debate. Even the papers look to be just a touch bored of recycling the same “Project Fear” scare stories for the 14th or 15th time, and it’s hard to keep track of all the identikit “warnings” from various corporations that don’t actually amount to anything more than “if things change we’ll keep an eye on them”, or in other words the bleeding obvious.

Enjoy the calm while it lasts, though, because in 11 days time the phony war is over.

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Earlier today we may have given some readers the impression that Gordon Brown’s six-point proposals for the constitutional future of Scotland within the UK were weak, vague and essentially meaningless waffle.

However, now that we’ve seen the recommendations (in a report rather egotistically entitled “Campbell II”) also produced today by Sir Menzies Campbell of the Liberal Democrats, we’ve realised that by comparison Mr Brown has delivered a masterwork of comprehensive, considered and well-thought-out detail.

Get a load – and we do mean a load – of this, readers.

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It’s Monday, so it must be time for Gordon Brown to lumber into the independence debate again. The man who was the least popular Prime Minister of the last 50 years magically transforms into a respected elder statesman when the British left is desperately trying to lend some progressive gravitas to the floundering No campaign in the wake of a series of ill-judged right-wing interventions from Tory ministers and millionaire business tycoons.

So we suppose we’re obliged to spend at least a couple of minutes examining the latest pronouncements of the man who so famously ended boom and bust.

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If you work in the media, the great attraction of completely making up stories is that everyone’s forgotten about them a few days later, so you can make up a totally different, equally false version at a later date with impunity.

Alert readers may recall, for example, that last November much of the media decided to claim that Andy Murray was definitely a Unionist.

So naive readers might imagine that when the Wimbledon and US Open winner came out at the weekend and said that in fact he WOULDN’T be publicly revealing his view on independence after all, that might be seen as a bit of a setback to the No camp.

We know better than that, of course.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days. (Sorry, we’ve forgotten to do these for a couple of weeks. Things have been a little busy.)

1. The price of the BBC
A realistic analysis of how well off a Scottish state broadcaster would be.

2. Sticking to the script
Labour MSP Makes Idiot Of Self At FMQs Shock.

3. Damn that uncertainty
George Osborne has his eye on North Sea oil money, again.

4. What you didn’t read this week
Major story positive for Yes breaks, media studiously ignores it.

5. All your ducks in a row
…while not only repeating tired old scares, but amalgamating them.

This week’s theme: don’t believe anything you see or hear. Except here, natch.

We’ve commented before on the odd way that newspapers can reveal their bias in the way they phrase their reporting, rather than in the actual content of it, which can be entirely factually accurate. As we noted, a particular giveaway is the angle from which they view statistics, and especially opinion polls.

A poll showing 35% of people backing independence will almost always be reported as “ONLY a third back Yes”, whereas one with the exact same numbers for a different question might be presented as “OVER a third distrust Alex Salmond”. The proportion “one third” is in such a manner portrayed as being both a small and a large one, to suit whatever position the publication wishes to promote.

It’s in such a context that we invite readers to ponder today’s Mail On Sunday.

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We again commend this week’s edition of the Sunday Herald to readers as 69p (for the digital version, or whatever the physical one costs in a newsagent these days) well spent on some interesting and balanced journalism.

Iain Macwhirter’s column is a particularly good read today, unusually incendiary and impeccably argued, but the thing that most caught our eye was a nice piece of investigative reporting on a theme Wings readers will find very familiar.

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This coming Thursday, March 13, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling will take part in an event at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, where he will be put “under public scrutiny at the hands of James Naughtie”, the presenter of the BBC’s flagship daily radio news show Good Morning Scotland.

Mr Naughtie, who was brought up from London to head BBC Scotland’s referendum coverage last year, has been frequently criticised by a former presenter of the same programme, Derek Bateman, for a failure to display an even-handed tone when questioning representatives of the Yes and No sides.

So we thought of an easy way for Mr Naughtie to put a stop to such allegations.

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