Here’s Alistair Darling on Radio Clyde this morning, reported by STV:
You know we’re not going to let that one slide without a fact-check, don’t you?
Remember the happy days of 2012 when Unionists complained endlessly that the independence debate was in danger of becoming bogged down by arguments about process rather than politics, readers?
We’re now in the third straight day of the No campaign and the media obsessing about a process (an independent Scotland’s currency arrangements) rather than the principle of whether Scotland should choose its own governments.
Above is a double-page spread from today’s Scottish Sun, which has extremely unusually gone with a front-page splash on politics (rather than its usual diet of celebrity freakshows) for the last three days, and which continues to hammer away – as all three opposition leaders did at FMQs yesterday – on the boneheaded demand for a “Plan B” if the rUK rejects a currency union.
The Sun does so despite devoting most of one of those pages to Alex Salmond telling them EXACTLY what Plan B would be, but evidently they’re a bit slow on the uptake, so let’s see if we can spell it out in words simple enough for Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson, Willie Rennie and Andrew Nicoll to understand.
Readers of this site may remember the story published on the BBC earlier this week, where the figures for GDP per capita miraculously switched overnight from showing Scotland as a net contributor to the UK to implying that Scotland was a net recipient.
And after reviewing the data posted by the BBC, it appears that the export figures have also been massaged to imply that Scotland exports vastly less than it does in reality.
We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.
We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.
There’s some very strange counting going on in the Times today. Firstly the paper carries a story about a survey of potential shale gas deposits in the central belt, and arrives at a very gloomy conclusion (“Modest deposits shake hope of shale bonanza”):
Hold on a minute. We’re not fans of fracking, but 80 trillion cubic feet? If the UK uses 3 tcf of gas a year, presumably Scotland, with 8.4% of the population, uses roughly 0.25 tcf a year. 80 tcf into 0.25 tcf suggests that the shale gas thought to be in the central belt would cover Scotland’s use for 320 years, which seems quite a lot.
Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.
(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)
We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.
Yesterday the UK government put out what was even by its standards a ludicrously hyperbolic piece of scaremongering about the costs of independence, suggesting that to set up all the governmental bodies the new state would require might come with an eye-watering price tag of £2.7 billion.
Its citing of the London School of Economics made it particularly interesting to hear what Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE actually said about the figures.
We’re rather kicking ourselves for not having spotted this one when it was staring us in the face, so kudos to Welsh professor of political science Roger Scully for the catch.
In the 2009 European elections, UKIP got 16.5% of the vote in the UK as a whole, and 5.2% in Scotland – a gap of 11.3%. In this year’s election the tallies were 27.5% in the UK and 10.5% in Scotland – a gap of 17%.
In other words, despite all the bluster from Unionists about how Scotland can no longer claim to be different to the rest of the UK in terms of supporting Nigel Farage’s party, in fact the degree of difference has substantially increased, by a whopping 55%.
It just seems worth pointing out.
According to Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine, this afternoon Johann Lamont issued a press release bizarrely calling on all supporters of “progressive” politics to unite against the SNP and UKIP. Now, that’s fairly mindboggling in itself in all sorts of ways, but we can’t help wondering whether she ran it past her deputy first.
Because that tweet raises a whole host of questions.
Recently we’ve been documenting a bizarre attempt by the No camp to terrify Scots with the thought that in order to continue to pay for pensions and public services and whatnot, an independent Scotland would need, um, almost exactly the same amount of immigration it has now. (Particularly alert readers may even recall when we pointed out that the UK parties used to have the exact opposite viewpoint.)
And it seems our critiques have already hit home.
Dear God. It’s now almost two and a half years since this site first comprehensively debunked and disproved the notion that Scottish independence would give the Conservatives a permanent majority in the rUK parliament, in an article that’s been read many tens of thousands of times here and spread far and wide elsewhere.
So you’ll forgive us if we spend a few minutes smashing our heads against a brick wall in despair at the mind-bleeding idiocy of some slobbering, sponge-witted poltroon quoted at length in the Telegraph today.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
