A new voice in the referendum debate – ladies and gents, Professor John Curtice!
Thank goodness. We hadn’t seen him on TV in hours, we thought he’d died.
It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.
So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.
A comment from a reader sent us off on a spot of Googling this morning. If you type nothing but the word “Wimbledon” into the search engine, the top result isn’t actually a link, but instead some sort of unclickable wired-in tournament schedule data.
A striking feature of the data is the national flags beside each contestant. We couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we typed in Andy Murray’s name.
So proud of my country and its government. Let’s get this done.
Each bright new day brings a fresh game of Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline here at WingsLand Towers, but we were a bit thrown by this morning’s front page.
“Economists say indyref could drive investors away” is pure Magnus, but that four-word qualifier tacked on the end is a bit out of character. What could be going on?
Seasoned readers will be aware of our as-yet-undiscovered mole at “Better Together” campaign headquarters. This morning the intrepid fifth columnist has managed to scan us the cover of the group’s handbook for activists (and forthcoming YouTube movie).
We’re sure more pages will be on the way soon, most days in the papers.
The weekend’s Scotland on Sunday contained another in a long series of doom-laden predictions about the state of an independent Scotland’s defences, including the assertion that current Scottish soldiers would choose to stay with the British armed forces rather than join Scotland’s because it’d be more exciting.
(Along, as independence supporters would expect, with the standard boilerplate that we’d all be killed by terrorists, and the now-traditional dodgy Scotsman poll.)
The Sunday Times, meanwhile, wasn’t being quite so careful.
Today’s editorial leader in Scotland on Sunday is really interesting, from a language nerd’s perspective (ie very much on our turf). Entitled “A warning to No campaign”, the column – nominally on the subject of pensions under devolution – purports to criticise said group, noting that “the Better Together campaign, by repeatedly presenting the idea of change as a threat, is doing Scotland no favours.”
But lurking just barely below the surface is an entirely different agenda.
A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.
(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)
A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.
There’s an intriguing interview in today’s Sunday Herald with ‘Better Together’ campaign director Blair McDougall (described by the paper as a “Labour apparatchik”), to mark the anniversary of the campaign’s launch. We recommend buying the paper – our digital copy costs just 69p from PressReader – and reading the whole thing, but if you’re pressed for time the last few paragraphs sum up the content pretty accurately.
And if you’re really in a rush, the last two sentences will do.
We’ve got quite the exclusive for you today, folks. We’re indebted to the alert civil servant who’s managed to smuggle out of Whitehall a copy of the UK government’s draft document of its inaugural greetings to the people of an independent Scotland, to be delivered (naturally) by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague.
Given Mr Hague’s recent comments on how “baffling” the very notion of Scottish independence apparently was, readers may find the practical behind-the-scenes reality reassuring. You can read the speech in full below.
This is a genuine request for enlightenment, readers. Hopefully someone can help.
When we’re bored, we like to take a look at the Herald website front page and play Spot The Magnus Gardham Headline. It’s not usually too taxing a game – by way of illustration, we suspect you won’t have too much trouble with this example:
The actual story itself, though, has us bewildered.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
