Wings Over Scotland

As a civil servant in London in the 1960s, and being part of the establishment, I always accepted the general view that an independent Scotland would not be able to survive on its own without financial help from the London Exchequer.

However, when in 1968 I was able to closely examine the UK’s “books” for myself in an official capacity, I was shocked to find that the position was exactly the opposite: that Scotland contributed far more to the UK economy than its other partners. And this, of course, was all before the oil boom.

I realised that the Treasury would wish to keep this a secret, as it might feed the then-fledgling nationalistic tendencies north of the border. I decided to keep an eye on the situation to see how long it would take for the true facts to emerge, which I felt would only be a short time. However, the machinery of Westminster, aided and abetted by the media, did an excellent job of keeping the myth about “subsidised” Scotland alive.

In fact it took another 30 years before the first chink in their armour appeared.

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Our more downmarket readers may have noticed this piece in today’s Scottish Sun:

But we were tickled to learn this morning, from a very well-placed inside source, that the advertising agency involved had also (genuinely) presented as part of their report a graphic demonstrating the current public perception of the No campaign.

You can see it below.

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As we’ve been poring over old opinion polls today, we thought we may as well share this with you. We make no suggestions that it proves anything about anything, it’s just fascinating. (It is to us, anyway, because the alternative is Strictly Come Dancing.)

It’s hopefully pretty self-explanatory. It charts the SNP’s lead (or, for much of the time, otherwise) in Holyrood opinion polling in the 16 months leading up to the 2011 Scottish election. And it’s interesting to ponder the timing of some of its peaks and troughs.

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We’ve read a lot in the past few days about how referendum polling basically hasn’t moved at all this year. But we weren’t sure if that was really true. So with nine months to go, it seemed a reasonable idea to check the stats for the LAST nine months and see if any progress was being made.

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A tweet from SNP MSP Marco Biagi caught our eye yesterday:

It’s a fun little morale-booster, especially when you note that the 2011 poll came just TWO months before the election, whereas there are still NINE months left to turn round the No camp’s steadily-shrinking lead on the referendum. But we found something even more fun when we were checking back on the stats.

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So, this again:

“The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.”
(George Orwell, “1984”)

But it’s hard to avoid in the circumstances.

The picture above is of Cumbernauld solicitor Ian Smart appearing on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, representing the Labour viewpoint. And we’re using that phrase in both its narrower and broader senses.

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On 20 May 2012 this site ran a headline which read “BREAKING: Lockerbie bomber still alive”. That was of course the day it was announced that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had died of prostate cancer. Even I did a double-take before the penny dropped.

The attached story was a mere 17 words long, but going by the links the assertion that Megrahi was not in fact the ‘Lockerbie bomber’ seemed to draw on three sources: the fact that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had found six grounds to believe the conviction might have been a miscarriage of justice; a documentary by Al-Jazeera based on investigations by George Thomson (a private detective who’d worked for Megrahi’s defence team); and a review article by English solicitor Gareth Peirce.

All good sources, but I had better reasons for believing that Megrahi was innocent.

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The under-occupancy penalty more commonly known as the bedroom tax is a policy whose roots lie in London. Rents in the UK capital are so extortionate that keeping a roof over the heads of the unemployed, low-paid, disabled and vulnerable has become a dreadful burden on the taxes of City bankers, in the few cases where they pay any.

Readers might be forgiven for imagining, then, that the savage benefit reductions would be punishing Londoners harder than people in other regions of the UK. We’ve just been crunching the numbers, and you might be a little surprised at who it turns out are actually bearing the brunt more than most.

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…and you haven’t got time to think of a misleading headline or laboriously rewrite a “Better Together” press release into something that might just about pass for actual news reporting if viewed fleetingly in poor lighting conditions, you can do nearly as good a job of distorting the truth with just a quick C-switched-for-W keypress.

It’s a real Scottish-media time-saver!

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Ask anyone who knows about such things and they’ll tell you that not only is the headline the most important aspect of an article, but often it’s the only part of it that people read at all. It’s a fact worth bearing in mind when you scan the media coverage of the main Scottish politics story of today.

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Spain’s supposed threat to veto Scottish membership of the EU is like one of those serial killers on a student campus in a slash ‘n gore movie. No matter how many times the evil maniac is stabbed, hit over the head with bricks, shot 46 times through the lungs with a depleted-uranium blunderbuss, drowned in boiling acid or baked in a kiln with the pottery-class homework, he’s still stalking the heroine in the final scene.

Today the vampiric figure of a Spanish EU veto threat received yet another silver, garlic-coated stake through the heart. But we expect it to get up and walk again every other week until September 2014 regardless.

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Today’s special referendum supplement in the Herald gives another run-out to the well-worn “women don’t like Alex Salmond” line much beloved of the Scottish press. It’s rare indeed that a month goes by without some mention somewhere of the fairer sex’s supposed dislike for the First Minister’s occasionally somewhat gallus nature, and today’s example is very much of its type.

“Yes campaign struggling to attract women voters” runs Magnus Gardham’s headline, and curiously notes of the paper’s poll findings that “the Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont emerges as a potential asset in appealing to women”.

Why “curiously”? Well, let’s actually have a closer look at those stats.

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