Wings Over Scotland

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?

Yesterday’s Telegraph contained another example of something we’ve noticed becoming increasingly common in newspapers recently where Scottish independence is concerned – the incredible vanishing story. Check out these first two paragraphs from a piece about investment in the oil industry:

“UK Energy Minister Michael Fallon warned on Monday that uncertainty over the outcome of the referendum on Scottish independence was already hitting investment in the North Sea.

Well, jings, crivvens and help – so to speak – wur boabs. How did we all manage to miss this one in the Sunday Times last month? We assume it’s meant to be comic.

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We’re not sure which of The Scotsman and Murdo Fraser of the Scottish Conservatives was most confused this morning. Reporting on the second half of its intriguing ICM poll (which put the gap between Yes and No votes as low as six points), the paper publishes some data about the attitude of Scots to the EU.

Excluding don’t knows, the results provide a clear 16-point margin for Scotland remaining in Europe, at 58% to 42%. (The raw numbers put it only slightly lower, at 46 to 33.) But for some odd reason the newspaper chooses to reveal this vote of confidence under the bafflingly negative headline “A third of Scots would back exit from EU”, without even an “only” in there to reflect the implication of the stats.

Weirder still is Murdo Fraser’s reaction, though.

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Switch the phrase “a Scottish Assembly” in the speech below for “an independent Scotland” and Alistair Darling could pretty much have made it word-for-word yesterday.

But can you tell which leader of the opposition actually did?

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We’ve been documenting lately the number of “Better Together” scare stories that have been horribly sagging under the weight of scrutiny since the turn of the year. But yesterday saw perhaps the No camp’s most significant boob yet.

Ladies’ foundation-garment manufacturer Michelle Mone has for some years insisted that she would pack up and leave Scotland – taking her factory and its attendant jobs with her – should Scotland have the temerity to vote for independence, causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the populace.

Yesterday, we’re delighted to report, she changed her mind.

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…not to laugh. The Scottish Daily Mail, unperturbed by the waves of mockery, is still banging away furiously on the “cybernats!” drum today, with another front-page lead and another two-page spread inside.

The paper’s managed to rope gormless Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale into its one-sided witch-hunt, and she pens an article dramatically entitled “TWITTER AND A THREAT TO BAYONET ME” complaining of someone “recently” threatening her, although the offensive tweet in question turns out (not revealed in the piece) to be 15 months old.

The above picture is – really and truly – the story’s illustration.

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