Wings Over Scotland

Earlier this week we had a little fun at the expense of the anaemic “grassroots” No campaign, revealing that almost all of its planned activity between now and the referendum was a single day’s leafleting of some railway stations. Yesterday we found out the reason – they’ve got a new leaflet, all about yesterday’s unspectacular comments on currency by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank Of England.

We have to assume that the leaflet was printed before the speech, and that any assertions it might make about Mr Carney’s view might not necessarily be entirely true. So let’s see if we can make sure everything stays on the straight and narrow.

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So we’ll just leave this here:

And then we’re off to bed.

[EDIT: Story confirmed with Jessica Bridges at Ladbrokes press office.]

As this site tends to focus mainly on the output of serious newspapers we haven’t previously spent a great deal of time scrutinising the Scottish Daily Mail, and we can only surmise that it’s upset them, because they seem to have been trying very hard this month to get our attention.

We must confess, it’s now become something of an addiction.

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The media is positively jumping with analyses of Mark Carney’s much-anticipated speech about currency unions, with thousands of words being expended to discuss something we’ve already summed up accurately in eleven. It’s almost comical to watch the amount of anti- (and very occasionally pro-) independence spin being put on a text which went pathologically out of its way not to make any kind of judgement whatsoever on the subject.

(Something Carney continued to do at the post-speech Q&A with journalists, at which he frequently looked bemused as a series of political hacks asked him massively leading questions along the lines of “So, you said X…” which he then had to wearily but firmly point out he hadn’t actually said at all. If you click the image below you can listen to an audio recording of the session.)

However much of an awful grump he is, the best, most sensible and balanced analysis (okay, the second-best after ours) is probably David Torrance’s.

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“Yeah, whatever you guys arrange between yourselves, we’ll make it work.“

When studying the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice, in truth one is spoiled for choice when considering the Scottish Daily Mail’s ongoing hate campaign against so-called “cybernats”.

It seems fair to say that the paper has blithely ignored Article 2, “A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for”, for example.

Articles 3 (i) (“Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications”) and 3 (iii) (“It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent”) also seem to have been somewhat cavalierly treated.

So we pretty much just stuck a pin in at random.

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The Mail is incredibly still banging away at its “evil cybernats” campaign today – we make that 19 days now – with another front page lead (this time, impressively somehow managing to turn SNP MSP Joan McAlpine being the victim of acts of online sabotage into an attack on the SNP) and another “Cybernat Watch” article inside.

One passage in an editorial, however, caught our eye. (Our emphasis.)

“It is not acceptable to make personal threats and insults under the guise of exercising the right to speak openly. It is an inescapable fact that while there are trolls on both sides, the so-called cybernats are more numerous, more vocal, more vituperative and act in consort.”

An “inescapable fact”? The Mail seems to have unaccountably failed to identify its material source. Who measured these things?  Can we have a link to the study data? Is there an internationally-recognised scale of vituperativeness? Is there a shred of evidence to back up the assertion that these alleged abusers “act in consort”?

Because if the Daily Mail doesn’t come forward with the proof of these allegations, and instead just continues making insulting comments and doorstepping, frightening and vilifying innocent members of the public for posting perfectly legal comments on the internet under their own names, it’ll be hard for the people of Scotland to arrive at any other conclusion than that the paper’s reporters are a bunch of bare-faced liars as well as bullies trying to selectively intimidate and silence one side of the debate.

There’s been a nice graphic going round social media this afternoon. It’s a map of Yes Scotland activist branches across the country, and it’s pretty impressive.

So for tonight’s And Finally, we thought it’d be a chuckle to compare it to the nearest “Better Together” equivalent, which has a rather less nationwide coverage.

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The Daily Record’s run a whole clutch of articles of a vaguely positive nature towards independence recently, which is nice. We assume Torcuil Crichton must be ill. But an editorial leader column today commenting on the Yes campaign’s encouraging poll figures and identifying the SNP’s social-justice policy programme as the reason had an intriguing line buried in the middle of it.

“Only Labour can win this battle for the UK and they have to run up a red flag for Scotland and sail under it. If that is a different banner from the rest of the UK, so be it.”

Hang on. What does that mean, exactly?

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In quieter moments recently we’ve been working away on early drafts of our next opinion poll (schedule TBA). We’ve got some interesting questions lined up for it, but it dawned on us earlier that with polls now coming out every other day, it might be fun to do something a bit original and different.

One of the hardest things about writing a poll is wording questions in a way that’s both fair and concise, because a confusingly-phrased one can really mess up the responses. (We actually lost one in our last poll because we hadn’t made it quite clear enough and the results that came back were muddled-up and useless.)

And we thought, what if we did away with words entirely?

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Now it all makes sense.

But how will we get by without our best undercover agent? We’re in trouble now.

Jim Murphy in the Daily Mail last week on the appalling “cybernats”:

“It’s time for the SNP and the First Minister to finally rein these people in. Washing their hands of them and pretending they don’t know who they are will no longer do.”

And this is a Labour spokesman in 2012 when a user of a Labour Facebook page had wished death on Alex Salmond’s 90-year-old father:

“This desperate smear campaign falls at the first hurdle because this Facebook page is not owned, managed, or operated by Scottish Labour, and it will not detract from the rantings and ravings of SNP candidates – sacked or otherwise – online.

Political parties are responsible for their candidates and officials, but members of the public must be responsible for their own behaviour.”

So, as far as we can follow: it’s nothing to do with Labour if its supporters – in a Facebook group subscribed to by all the party’s most prominent Scottish MPs, MSPs and activists – wish for Alex Salmond’s dad to die, but as soon as some random nat calls Jim Murphy a “w*****” (whatever one of those is), it’s no longer a private matter and the SNP and First Minister must take direct personal responsibility and action?

Have we got that about right?