The latest in the UK government’s “Scotland Analysis” series of independence briefing papers was released this week on the back of William Hague’s visit to Glasgow.
At 119 pages, the EU and International Issues paper is nobody’s idea of a slim pamphlet, but it’s remarkably light on meaty content.
Me, writing in April 2010, before there was a Wings Over Scotland:
Once in a while it’d be nice to get it completely wrong.
#ukok #bettertogether
For those of you wanting to look at the report on broadcasting bias from the University of the West of Scotland, we’ve uploaded it to the Repository, and you can also grab it directly from this link. Thanks to the alert readers who sent it in.
We doubt if anyone is going to faint with amazement from the discovery that an academic study has found TV news coverage of the independence debate was biased against the Yes side by a 3-2 margin between September 2012 and September 2013.
But what’s useful about the University of West of Scotland research is that it sets out the exact nature of the various types of biases, and gives a precise number for how many times each type occurred. This moves us on considerably, because complaints can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than (to misquote Derek Bateman) the paranoia of nationalists obsessing over how many times Jackie Bird raises her left eyebrow while reading from an autocue.
We can’t be the only people, surely, to find the latest “Better Together” gambit one of their strangest yet. Never mind the made-up figures or the spurious assertions or their usual habit of having headline amounts which use cumulative sums over many years to make numbers sound bigger. Just look at the barely-concealed subtext here:
“Don’t leave the UK, or you’ll have to give your money to the English! Eurgh!”
Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, just discovered:
God DAMN it! Who knew we were just the unwitting dupes of the Belgians all along?
Step 1: Write an offensive, provocative piece of trollbait for the Daily Mail, describing your opponents as “kilted bum-barers who bellow ‘freedom’ whenever an English person hoves into view” and suggesting that a Yes vote is an abdication of morality.
(If you can then somehow get the Guardian to reprint it, bonus!)
Step 2: Whine like a baby when you get the response you wanted all along.
When we started the week with news of the UK government’s statement on debt, we wondered aloud whether it would be a game-changing moment. Judging by the No camp’s reaction since then, shrieking and flailing and lashing out blindly in all directions simultaneously, our question’s been answered.
It’s been hard to keep track of it all, but we’ll have a go.
Some loony posted this to YouTube on Christmas Eve, so we’ve only just stumbled across it. It’s the speech given by Scotland’s Sweetheart (and Wings Over Scotland contributor), the estimable Saffron Dickson, to the Radical Independence Conference back in November, and it’s seven minutes of your life well spent.
We hope to live long enough to see her as First Minister.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
