In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.
It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.
The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.
But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.
So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.
It got a bit out of control, frankly.
Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.
It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.
The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.
In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.
This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.
It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.
The call:
The response:
“Opposition parties used the publication of the manifesto to attack the SNP government’s record.
So that went well. Nice try, BMA.
We had an interesting conversation last night with someone who was prepared, quite legitimately, to credit Scottish Labour with a little more good faith over their proposed plan to mitigate Tory tax credit cuts than we were. But we had a lot of trouble coming to an agreement over the arithmetic, and we tend to think that backs up our cynicism.
Labour have presented their supposed funding for the policy in an incredibly dishonest and disingenuous way, and it seems to have confused the media to the point where nobody in the print or broadcast media has challenged what appears to be a huge and (to us at least) incredibly obvious gaping hole in the finances.
Let’s walk through it one more time.
The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.
First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:
This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.
This month we’ve been noting a sudden avalanche of factually-questionable articles in the media attacking the SNP’s record in government. At the weekend and yesterday we also picked apart a highly misleading and disingenuous claim by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics that there had been no cuts to the Scottish Government budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.
And today we can see why.
At the weekend this site noted that on the BBC’s Sunday Politics, presenter Andrew Neil claimed that the Scottish Government’s budget had not been reduced in real terms in “the last five or six years”, and that therefore Scotland has not faced cuts.
But as we pointed out, the Scottish Government budget HAS been cut, year-on-year, since the Tories took office. The independent Fiscal Affairs Scotland assessed the cumulative reduction at a hefty 10%, or a little over £3bn a year.
And then things got interesting.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
