Wings Over Scotland

My first contribution to Wings Over Scotland appeared last May and gave an account of my then-current undecided stance on Scottish independence. Savaged mercilessly in the comments as “A bit of a long-winded ‘don’t know'”, in summary we learned three things from it: I’m crap at making decisions, the media coverage of the issue upsets me, and I wasn’t convinced of anything changing for the better after a Yes vote.

Nine months later, only one of those feelings has altered.

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Glasgow Labour reveal next council-election candidate:

(Inside man: alert reader “Al Ghaf”.)

Try as we might, we’re only one small website and we can’t track every last news story in the world. So we’re not sure who died and made Calum Cashley chief of the Internet Police. But whoever it was did the cause of independence a great disservice by not clinging to life for a couple more years.

The Herald’s front-page headline this morning – that is, the most important thing the newspaper considers to be happening in the world today – is “Yes campaigners launch bid to silence cybernats“. We won’t insult our readers’ intelligence by naming its author. It exists solely as a result of the actions of Calum Cashley, and it manages to turn an event of such microscopic non-significance it wouldn’t have raised a gnat’s eyelash into a bilious spew of toxic No-campaign propaganda. Nice work, officer.

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Poor old Captain D still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Click the image to find out what it is.

One of the problems for anyone highlighting media bias is the “invisible hypothetical”. Take, by way of example, this snapshot of today’s Scotsman website front page:

The headline on the first piece especially is an astonishing piece of work. Rather than report that Parliament had passed a motion criticising the UK government’s welfare reforms (something given extra poignancy by the article below it, and despite Labour voting with the Tories and Lib Dems against the motion), the paper mind-bogglingly manages to twist the story into an attack on the SNP for not explicitly providing an alternative plan – even though Holyrood has no powers over welfare.

We invite any Wings Over Scotland readers with an idle moment to ponder what the headline might have been had it been Labour attacking the SNP in similar circumstances. We’ll get you started – you’ll be wanting the word “ACCUSED”.

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Seems to have been a small typesetting error on this one.

We hadn’t previously bothered commenting on the Guardian cartoon by Steve Bell that had a lot of independence supporters hot under the collar this week. We’d assumed, as seemed the most likely explanation, that it had actually been a comment on what David Cameron was alleged to have mouthed to Angus Robertson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and that Cameron was therefore the main intended target.

We worried that the nationalists who beseiged the paper with angry comments were perhaps being a little oversensitive and looking for offence where none had been meant. Ironically, the cartoon happened only days after we’d highlighted our own habitual inability to understand what Bell’s cartoons were supposed to be about, and that comment turned out to be prophetic, because we had indeed called it wrong.

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The UK’s respect agenda, from last night’s Question Time on nuclear waste:

So, this was January:

Yeah, we’ll take that.

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In the light of the Electoral Commission setting higher limits for referendum campaign spending, Labour’s Richard Baker, Dr. Richard Simpson and Alistair Darling embark on an urgent fundraising drive outside The Rangers’ next away game in SFL 3.

(We might have gone with this, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to embed YouTube video at a specified starting point, at least in so far as we don’t know how to do it.)

Alex Salmond’s appearance on Scotland Tonight this week raised an issue we’ve been meaning to address for a while, so let’s do it now before we forget again.

Of the numerous polls of the last few months, the most encouraging for supporters of independence was the one conducted by Panelbase for the Sunday Times in late October. It showed a pretty tight race at 37% Yes to 45% No, but the most interesting aspect was how the numbers changed when voters were asked for their opinion in the hypothetical scenario that they expected the Conservatives be returned as either a majority or coalition government at the 2015 Westminster general election.

In that scenario, independence leapt ahead with a massive 10% swing, to lead by 52% to 40%. But much less reported by the media was another finding of the poll.

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