This is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall looking comfortable and confident on last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight as the recently-controversial subject of campaign donations was discussed.
Not for the first time, his comments seemed a little at odds with the truth.
There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.
But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.
We’ve noted a few times in the past that one of the challenges of highlighting media bias is that you rarely get a chance to directly compare like with like. If a Labour MP is caught up in some sort of scandal and the media soft-pedal it, say, it’s all very well claiming “It’d be different if this was someone in the SNP”, but unless the latter does the exact same thing it’s hard to make it stick.
So this week presents a rare opportunity to study the phenomenon in the flesh, as both the Yes and No campaigns release their lists of campaign contributions so far. Let’s see how it went.
A few days ago we bemoaned the state of the Royal Mail under its partial privatisation by successive Labour and Tory governments, and noted that often the post didn’t arrive until well into the afternoon. And sure enough, it was only a few minutes ago that we picked this up from the doormat.
The short version is, we don’t know either.
As of around half an hour ago, the National Collective website looks like this:
The site had recently attracted a great deal of traffic for a post entitled “Dirty Money: The Tory Millionaire Bankrolling Better Together”, which compiled together links to a number of newspaper articles about Ian Taylor, a businessman who donated £500,000 to the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign.
The story was picked up today by the Herald and Daily Record, with the latter’s piece including the line “Vitol said allegations made about them this week were inaccurate and they were taking legal advice”. [EDIT 4.15pm: The Guardian now reports that “the Herald has now had a lawyer’s letter and so too has National Collective”.]
(Possibly coincidentally, the site’s Wikipedia entry has been nominated for deletion.)
As far as we can establish, the stories linked in “Dirty Money” – in, among others, the Guardian, Mirror and Telegraph – are still online. There’s an absurd, huffy, pious whinge on the “Better Together” website complaining with no apparent irony about the article being part of “a co-ordinated dirty-tricks campaign by the nationalists”.
Other than that, we’re as much in the dark as everyone else.
The Daily Record, 5th May 2010:
“Before Margaret Thatcher, Scotland made steel, ships, cars and trucks and produced coal. By the time she had finished with our country, all those industries were devastated – and tens of thousands of proud men and their families were living in ravaged communities with no jobs and no hope.
Scotland could wake up tomorrow to the grim reality of a new Tory government, led by Thatcher disciple David Cameron. And for all his talk of “compassion”, few doubt that we will suffer again if he wins power. We spoke to five men who lost their livelihoods under the Tories, and they all had the same message for the voters: “Don’t let them loose on Scotland again.”“
Well, voting Labour didn’t work. What else could we try?
This is from last weekend’s Sunday Herald:
And then there’s this, from the Herald back in January:
(All emphases ours.) Mr Taylor lives in London – not located in Scotland the last time we checked – and is Chief Executive of an oil-trading company called Vitol, whose extremely colourful history includes the fact that “Last year, it was revealed that for a decade the company had been using Employee Benefit Trusts which avoided tax on incomes of its UK staff and was in discussion with HMRC about a deal to pay this off.”
(The next-biggest donator, author CJ Sansom, sent their £161,000 cheque from their home in Sussex, which we’re fairly sure also isn’t in Scotland.)
We’ve dropped Mr Sheridan a line asking if he finds non-Scottish-resident, tax-avoiding Ian Taylor’s huge donation to the No campaign “nauseating”. We’ll let you know his answer the minute it arrives, which surely won’t be long.
We haven’t actually seen any really nice pictures of the impromptu event in Glasgow last night, or at least we hadn’t until Ross Wood sent us some of his. Check out his website for more beautiful shots of this and other things.
We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.
Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.
We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:
Attentive readers will of course recall the shocking revelations from the No campaign earlier this year about the terrifying cost of independence to Scots – £1 a head. But what’s the latest info on the price of staying in the UK?
£1 for independence or £891 for the Union? Tough call.
We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:
It seems fitting somehow.
As we browsed the print edition of the Daily Record today to compare its coverage of the latest independence referendum donations news with the online version (with particular regard to Kevin McKidd), we spotted something else curious.
We’ve already noted a curious hypocrisy in the Scotsman’s reporting of the same issue this morning, where it pointedly questioned whether the SNP had handed over some sizeable donations to the party to the Yes campaign, while allowing Blair McDougall to make a virtue out of the fact that Labour and the Conservatives hadn’t transferred party funds to the No campaign. But the Record’s arithmetic is even more confused than the Scotsman’s logic.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
