There’s been a fair bit of crowing from “Better Together” about some recent poll results. Which is fair enough – almost everybody likes to shout when they get some good news (though this site has consistently urged caution over polling findings months before a vote, whether favourable or not).
It is, however, always wise to look at the small print.
We’ve been wiping tears of laughter from our eyes most of this morning, after reading one of the most magnificently bare-faced and audacious pieces of black-is-white lying we think we might ever have seen printed with a straight face in a British newspaper.
It appears in the Telegraph, which seems to have positioned itself latterly as the Daily Sport for people with a reading age above seven, and makes the mindboggling claim that “Contrary to its media image, the campaign to save the United Kingdom says it has more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents”.
In fairness, it doesn’t actually say whether these boots have any feet in them.
Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.
The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.
We’re still trying to make sense of some confusing arithmetic in Gordon Brown’s latest doomspeech about pensions, which was delivered this evening at Glasgow University and which we examined in some detail here.
One part in particular had us scratching our heads in bafflement, so we’ve pulled it out for some closer scrutiny by itself. Tell us if we get anything wrong.
If you’ve ever found yourselves in a situation where you’re dating someone from the hardcore militant wing of vegetarianism, readers, you’ll know that their life – and by extension yours – quickly becomes defined by what’s missing.
Whether shopping or going out to a restaurant or a surprisingly large number of other things, hazards you’d never previously imagined loom menacingly everywhere. Veggie “beanburgers” often apparently contain unadvertised cheese, innocent-looking sweeties turn out to be glazed with beeswax, and so on.
But soon you familiarise yourself with the “everything-free” aisle in supermarkets, where much more expensive facsimiles of normal foodstuffs – now bereft of dairy, gluten, sugar and goodness knows what else – reside, leaving you to wonder over the mysteries of the sinister-sounding unheard-of substances they’ve replaced them with.
And increasingly, so it is with politics.
The chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, Bertie Armstrong, was reported in yesterday’s Press & Journal as saying that a vote for independence would leave Scotland with a weaker voice in the EU, as it would only have seven votes in the Council of EU Ministers, compared to the UK’s 29 votes.
(Which it would likely retain even in the event of losing 5.3 million of its citizens, due to the Treaty of Nice favouring the six largest countries: Germany, France, Italy and the UK all have 29 votes, while Spain and Poland have 27 each; the next largest is the Netherlands with only 13, even though the difference between their population size and Poland’s is exactly the same as that between Poland’s and the UK’s).
But Mr Armstrong seems to be having a problem with his arithmetic.
The SNP has made hay with the damning appraisal of Scottish Labour’s “Devo Nano” plans which was delivered this week by charity think-tank Reform Scotland, and in particular its rejection of Labour’s claims that the proposals would mean Holyrood raising 40% of its own budget.
(As we’ve noted before, we’re not very sure why anyone’s meant to find that exciting anyway. You don’t make a difference to society by changing the address of the tax office, you make it by changing what you spend your money on.)
Because it looks, not for the first time, as if Labour’s got its sums wildly wrong.
Remember, kids – nationalism is bad. Stay away from the evil nationalists, or they might steal your Union Jack flag, Union Jack t-shirt or Royal Standard.
The only number that can be divided to end up with nothing is zero.
We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.
Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.
Recently discovered by an alert reader, another gem revealing the sort of razor-sharp attention to statistical detail that led the UK into the most disastrous recession of all time, from a man who thinks the population of Scotland is six million:
“Asked if he fancied another crack at being chancellor in the future, Darling said: ‘At the moment I am totally focused on the [Scottish] referendum in October 2014, after that I will see where I stand.'”
Might want to work a little more on that focus, Cap’n.
(Quote from May 2013, two months after the referendum date was announced.)
The Guardian tonight reports, by way of covering Johann Lamont’s debacle at First Minister’s Questions today, an interesting snippet related to our post of earlier today:
Half a million? This weekend? Are we sure about that?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
