Wings Over Scotland

As keen readers will know, this blog is often to be found lamenting the disappointing standards upheld by the Scottish media. We’re especially dismayed when fully-staffed professional newspapers fail to catch spelling errors and typos, such as the one that crept into Brian Monteith’s latest batshit-mental ponderings for the Scotsman.

While bafflingly castigating Alex Salmond for failing to have the referendum at a time advantageous to the Unionist parties, Conservative pundit and former MSP Mr Monteith has inexplicably left an “L” out of one of the words in this sentence:

“Then can we all move on and get back to the real world of sorting out the nation’s problems like having jobs for our youth and care facilities for our elderly”

Sloppily, none of the Scotsman’s subs caught the error. Can you help them, readers?

Well now, that rascal Brer Fox hated Brer Rabbit, on account of he was always cutting capers and bossing everyone around. So Brer Fox decided to capture and kill Brer Rabbit if it was the last thing he ever did! He thought and he thought until he came up with a plan. He would make a tar baby! Brer Fox went and got some tar and he mixed it with some turpentine and he sculpted it into the figure of a cute little baby. Then he stuck a hat on the Tar Baby and sat her in the middle of the road.

Brer Fox hid himself in the bushes near the road and he waited and waited for Brer Rabbit to come along. At long last, he heard someone whistling and chuckling to himself, and he knew that Brer Rabbit was coming up over the hill. As he reached the top, Brer Rabbit spotted the cute little Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was surprised. He stopped and stared at this strange creature. He had never seen anything like it before!

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The YesScotland campaign website conducted an interesting thought experiment last week, turning the independence referendum question on its head by asking “If Scotland was still an independent nation, would you vote to join the Union?” It was an interesting and imaginative piece, penned by campaign head Blair Jenkins, and it got us pondering over which other aspects of the referendum might take on a different perspective if viewed a different way.

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We note with micro-interest that the Unionist parties have today announced their preferred question for the independence referendum – a policy they all strenuously opposed at the election, in which they were overwhelmingly defeated. And unusually for this blog, as a result we find ourselves having something in common with the “No” camp, because nobody gives a toss what we think the question should be either.

Bearing that in mind, we invite readers to suggest their own proposed question. We’ll gather up all the best ones at the end of the day and send them to the Electoral Commission, in case they’d like to scrutinise them.

Courtesy of the sadly-deceased CalMerc, here’s an example to get you started.

Alert viewers will have noticed a drop in the frequency of postings on this blog, and it was a toss-up today between what we're about to discuss and posting some pictures of bizarre confectionery-branded candles. And actually, what the heck – you've not had much in the way of content recently, so let's do both.

Seriously, what's the story here? Aren't you just basically inviting small children to eat candles? And is there a cherry-flavoured Skittle anyway? Now, about that rape thing.

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We were frankly staggered today to see that the Herald is still determined to flog the dead and rotting horse that is the Martin Sime “scandal”. It had seemed that the paper had slunk away with its “exclusive” between its legs after the widespread contempt generated by the first story, but incredibly it seems doggedly insistent on destroying the remaining shreds of its journalistic integrity by digging the hole even deeper.

The original piece was written by the Herald’s new political editor Magnus Gardham, until recently a faithful servant of the staunchly Unionist and staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Record. Entitled “Salmond in secret push to obtain a devo max option”, the story didn’t present a scrap of evidence of Salmond doing anything, secretly or otherwise. In fact, it was fabricated almost entirely from empirical lies, from the headline down. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, “Devo Max” is dead. Since the turn of the year, the current Prime Minister and the last one have both issued clear declarations that the idea of full fiscal autonomy for Scotland within the UK is simply a non-starter.

Even while Scottish labour “leader” Johann Lamont umms and aahs and coyly refuses to reveal which additional powers she might or might not want devolved to the Scottish Parliament in future, Ruth Davidson of the Scottish Tories hops from one position to another according to whether the London party have told her what she believes that day or not, and Willie Rennie’s increasingly-laughable Scottish Lib Dems put their faith in what we think is the party’s 57th Home Rule talking shop, David Cameron and Gordon Brown have unceremoniously slammed the door on the notion. So what’s left?

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(Actual story.)

The most-read WingsLand posts of the last seven days, in descending order.

Those vile cybernats
The positive case for the Union.

WCR Smackdown 2012
Willie Rennie performs epic fail, gets pwned.

The devolution reality check
Gordon Brown torpedoes the good ship Jam Tomorrow.

Another Union dividend
Is Scottish athletes being forced to emigrate a good thing?

The assault on reason
Subtly shifting the goalposts of “bias”.

A brief note on opinion polls
Cause for optimism.

Reading between the numbers
Analysing the meaning of Scottish newspapers’ sales figures.

Scots eat cake, demand cake
The greedy voters who want it both ways.

Showing your hand
“Liberal Democrats” attempt to silence liberal and democratic dissent.

Now that’s just going too far
Sainsbury’s tell Scots their place.

By now most of you should have seen the latest circulation figures for newspapers in Scotland. As you’ll know, though, Wings Over Scotland likes to delve around below the headlines when it comes to stats, so we’ve had our own rummage, done a little data-bashing and come up with a few hopefully-interesting findings.

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In the last 24 hours we’ve now asked at least half-a-dozen different people, of various party loyalties and none, if they can explain exactly what crime Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie apparently considers Martin Sime of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations to be guilty of. Curiously, every time we’ve asked the question the conversation has immediately gone dead and stayed that way.

So far as we’ve been able to establish, an SNP adviser called Alex Bell sent Mr Sime an unsolicited email bringing to his attention a poll that showed a large majority of trade union members to be in favour of a second question in the independence referendum, which would provide the option of more powers for the Scottish Parliament while remaining in the Union.

The core question, then, seems to be whether this is an inappropriate position for SCVO to be taking, and therefore whether Mr Sime would be acting inappropriately in receiving such an email (leaving aside for a moment the issue of how he’d be supposed to have avoided receiving it).

To answer that question, first we need to consult the SCVO’s mission statement, which states the organisation’s purpose as “To support people to take voluntary action to help themselves and others, and to bring about social change”.

That’s perhaps a little vague, so instead let’s examine the submission the Council sent to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the subject of the independence referendum and specifically the number of questions therein, which it published in May of this year.

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We live, perhaps more than at any time in history, in a world characterised by open lies. Only this week, the coalition government was caught red-handed understating the number of school playing-field closures under its administration by 50%. A punk band in Russia singing a protest song about the President’s attacks on human rights are accused of religious hatred, in a show trial every bit as transparently corrupt as anything Stalin or Hitler would have ordered.

Meanwhile in the West, a man dedicated to exposing truth and criminal activities is wanted by the USA to put on trial for espionage. Democratically elected politicians in the “home of the free” call for him to be executed or extra-judicially assassinated as a terrorist. Conversely, the same man portrays as political persecution attempts to have him extradited to another country to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

(We’re surprised that the UK authorities don’t solve the problem at a stroke by simply getting Kenny Farquharson of the Scotsman to determine whether Assange is guilty or innocent while he’s still in the Ecuadorian embassy. After all, Kenny is apparently able to judge these things without all the tedious and time-consuming business of presenting evidence, hearing a defence and establishing or corroborating facts. So long as the accused doesn’t have access to highly-paid lawyers, of course.)

Here in Scotland things are no different. In the last week alone, two senior Unionist politicians have perpetrated enormous and deliberate lies cynically calculated to poison and undermine discourse. Ian Davidson and Willie Rennie have made inflammatory statements no intelligent human being could possibly believe to be true (we’ll pass tactfully over the issue over whether such a definition in fact includes either man), and angrily reasserted them when challenged.

There is only one purpose for actions like these. They are knowingly designed to create an intimidatory atmosphere where journalists are cowed into following the agenda desired by the culprits, and deflected from areas that said culprits don’t wish reported on. The wider intent is to control the media by recalibrating the centre ground of “impartiality”, and thereby achieve a strategic shift of coverage in their favour.

Here’s how it works.

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