Wings Over Scotland

We like to put a bit of extra effort in in January. The excitement of a fresh new year, coupled with the need to shake people out of the festive-period stupor that otherwise kills momentum stone dead, calls for 110%. Even so, with the slow opening week and then losing most of a weekend to a server outage, we weren’t expecting this.

Not only were January’s pageview stats more than 30% up on December, but they also smashed the all-time record set in November by well over 100,000.

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We were expecting the turnout for the No campaign’s Great Train Mobbery to be a lot better for the afternoon session, on account of the fact that nobody would have to get up at 6am to go and leaflet a dark, freezing-cold railway station.

The opposite turned out to be true.

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While we struggle through a tax return and our intrepid spotters document the second half of Better Together’s Big Train-Station Day Out, we figured you might like to read the Scottish Daily Mail’s story on the operation.

It’s a strange piece, opening with a dramatic “evil cybernat spies under the bed” headline and an opening paragraph about “sinister twists” and how we’re a “notorious abusive blog”, but then the remainder of the text twice repeats the point that we asked spotters not to harass anyone and that we’re merely challenging BT’s untruths.

It’s like their heart just wasn’t in the smear anymore.

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We take our hats off to the No campaigners who braved a cold, dark Scottish morning to go and hand out leaflets to the public at train stations across the country today.

We’d have preferred it if they were distributing leaflets that weren’t packed with a litany of flat-out lies, of course, but we suppose you can’t have everything.

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Just in case any of our spotters tomorrow fancy handing out their own leaflets.

Click image to see the whole thing, and download the PDF for printing here.

The Guardian tonight reports, by way of covering Johann Lamont’s debacle at First Minister’s Questions today, an interesting snippet related to our post of earlier today:

“The pro-UK Better Together campaign announced that it was to distribute half a million leaflets at railway stations, homes and high streets in Scotland this weekend with the single word “goodbye” on its front page, the O letters replaced by pound coins.”

Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?

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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.“