Wings Over Scotland

The Scotsman usually makes at least a token effort at concealing its bias a little bit better than this. We’re not sure what’s happened this morning.

What we mean is that normally when you want to find out one of the paper’s headlines is a massive misrepresentation of the truth, you might not have to dig far, but it’s usually slightly deeper than the story’s own strapline.

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So we read this earlier today from New Statesman journalist George Eaton:

We don’t mind telling you we were on tenterhooks waiting for the first concrete policy commitment of Ed Miliband’s three-year Labour leadership. Then it arrived.

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Wings Over Scotland undertook a research trip to London yesterday – mainly to check out the Propaganda: Power And Persuasion exhibition at the British Library, which we definitely recommend should you find yourself in the vicinity. Later in the day, though, we took a stroll down Oxford Street, and found ourselves horrified by the state of it.

The UK capital’s great retail showpiece looked like the aftermath of a Luftwaffe bombing raid on a run-down part of Burnley. Much of the south side of the street had been ripped to pieces by ongoing and seemingly endless work for the Crossrail project (sound familiar, Edinburgh residents?), but even where buildings were untouched by the builders there were boarded-up shops, tatty frontages and once-proud units now occupied by scores of scruffy tourist tat shifters.

And if even the great West End has now fallen into that sort of dilapidated, thoroughly depressing condition, despite three decades of all the country’s wealth being greedily sucked down to London, then what of the rest of the country?

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It’s been several months since we last did a major reader survey, so we’d quite like to poke our noses in again and get your views on a few issues that we didn’t ask about last time, as well as learning a little more about you personally. Some of the questions are directly relevant to the constitutional debate, some aren’t – we’re just curious. Feel free to skip any you’d rather not answer. As if you needed us to tell you that.

(NB All votes are anonymous, in case that’s important. We have no way of knowing how any individual reader voted on any question.)

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Readers may recall how back in January of this year we highlighted a truly horrible piece by tribal Labour dinosaur Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, where in reference to the current grotesque condition of the UK he wrote “No campaigners must publicise the fact that this is as good as it gets, and win votes by emphasising that reality”.

Ian Bell in the Herald today reports some figures from the latest research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, an organisation comprising analysts from six major universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s a sample:

“More than 30 million people “suffering some degree of financial insecurity”; close to 12 million “too poor to engage in common social activities”; around four million children and adults who are not properly fed; around 2.5 million children in damp homes; around 1.5 million children “in households that cannot afford to heat their home”.”

This, we’re told even by Labour in the No campaign, is the best the UK can ever hope to deliver. In their own words, the Union can offer us nothing better than that, and almost certainly worse still in the future. Is there anything else to say?

Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.

This week’s papers had a story about ‘cybernats’ posting rude messages on social media about Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s opposition to Scottish independence.

For the uninitiated, ‘cybernat’ is the term used in Scottish politics to refer, ostensibly, to slightly mad old-school nationalists who post vile, personalised attacks on their political opponents. Some politicos in Scotland don’t seem to understand, though, that this attack doesn’t really work as a political device as it seeks to apply a pejorative to the SNP when everyone knows it can be applied to some supporters of all political parties. Take a look at the comment pages of any UK newspaper.

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From the one-man gaffe goldmine that is Central Ayrshire Labour MP Brian Donohoe:

We do sympathise, and not just with the unfortunate (but alert) constituent of Mr Donohoe’s who sent us this recent press release. It can’t be easy for poor Brian either, constantly having to remind himself “Commemorate… not celebrate. Commemorate… not celebrate” like a low-rent version of Viz’s immortal Eight Ace.

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When UKIP’s Nigel Farage was recently made rather unwelcome in Edinburgh, a whole slew of Unionist politicians and commentators – most notably Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie – took to the nation’s airwaves and newspaper columns to piously condemn the protestors who peacefully but loudly voiced their disapproval of Farage’s policies. Angry online No supporters, as is their wont, were less measured in their fury at the “suppression” of Farage’s free speech.

Today, the subject of the media’s blanket outrage – there are sizeable stories in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, The Times, Express and many more – is the saintly British Olympic cyclist, Sir Chris Hoy. The unfortunate sportsman has been the subject of what the Mail calls “vile abuse” for some comments in yesterday’s papers in which he ostensibly refused to take sides in the independence debate (but in reality could barely have made his position any clearer).

But another similar (and rather more serious) story, about online abuse directed at a Scottish public figure every bit as well known as Hoy, inexplicably gets only a microscopic fraction of the coverage.

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The Herald today reports officially (or at least semi-officially, quoting “a senior Treasury source”) what we’ve been telling you for months:

“Scotland’s annual block grant is set to be cut by hundreds of millions of pounds in a knock-on effect from George Osborne’s attempt to find £11.5 billion of extra savings across Whitehall budgets.”

The cuts will be implemented in 2015, if Scotland votes No to independence. Labour has repeatedly refused to commit itself to higher spending in the event it wins the 2015 election. The net effect on the Scottish budget of both up-front and hidden cuts like those described in the links above will be likely to run into billions of pounds.

When Johann Lamont says that universal services for Scots are no longer affordable, she isn’t basing her calculations on Scotland’s own finances, because Scotland can afford them and will be able to afford them for decades to come. She’s basing them on the reduced pocket money that Scotland will receive from Westminster regardless of who wins the next election, because that’s the true meaning of “One Nation Labour”.

If you like cuts, vote No for more. Lots more.

There’s a story in the Herald this morning that wouldn’t normally come within this site’s remit, dealing as it does with a specific aspect of Scottish Government policy unaffected by independence. It reports a Celtic fan acquitted under the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act after admitting singing a pro-IRA song at a game between the Parkhead club and Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

For reasons we must confess ourselves puzzled by, a great swathe of the Scottish commentariat, on all sides of the constitutional debate, has set itself against the OB(F)A, apparently in the belief that existing laws had done such a good job of eliminating Scotland’s sectarian problem over the last 100 years that there was no need for additional action.

We expect this case will be used as further ammunition for their criticisms of it. But there’s a crucially important line buried three-quarters of the way down the piece.

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A FOREIGN POLICY

Margaret Curran should know the truth
Of engaging brain before opening mooth;
Using the word “foreigner”
Like a profanity
Offends large sections of humanity.

She should know better and be more carin’

Each one of us is a Jock Tamson bairn;

To hear an apology would be divine,
But don’t hold your breath – I won’t hold mine.