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Amount of money saved by Iain Duncan Smith’s “benefit cap” so far:
Amount of money wasted on Universal Credit welfare reform so far:
£120 million (or £140m, or £200m, or £425m)
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The UK government – saving you money on welfare by 2034! (If you’re lucky.)
We saw this graphic on the “Better Together” website yesterday, but we dismissed it as uninteresting even by their playground-propaganda standards, amounting as it does to nothing more than some startlingly feeble carping along the lines of “These are their forecasts, but we’ve made different forecasts so theirs must be wrong!”
But an alert reader observed that it was MUCH stupider than that. Can you spot why?
We were very pleased with the coverage of our latest Panelbase poll on Monday’s edition of Scotland Tonight. A nice introductory package showed some lingering shots of our front page and logo, and the poll findings were used as a jump-off for an interesting debate between Dennis Canavan and Ian Davidson.
It takes more than a bit of flattery to make us take our eye off the ball, though.
Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.
This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.
What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?
THOSE really big banks?
Sorry, folks. We haven’t quite managed to get going today. We’ve got a cold, the weather’s grey and miserable, and watching the TV feels like being stuck in a bad dream you can’t wake up from, as the Tories look for new ways to be evil and Labour’s response isn’t to condemn their grotesque, neo-feudal plans for the people of Britain, but to say “Hey, you’re stealing our ideas!”
(The ever-delightful Liam Byrne, there, apparently totally unashamed to say that “this announcement is little more than reheating of a Labour scheme – ‘Work for your Benefits’ – which the Tories scrapped when they came into power”.)
Beset by this avalanche of vile, spiteful idiocy (all of which was allowed to pass unchallenged by a subservient BBC), our germ-weakened mind has reeled like a punch-drunk boxer. But we’re not yet quite so addled and bewildered that the likes of Ruth Davidson can get anything past us.
Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?
It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.
We know “Better Together” has a history of mangling statistics beyond all recognition, but today’s effort might just take the biscuit. Their Facebook page and Twitter feed still carries a graphic distorting the true findings of today’s Lord Ashcroft polling to a degree so spectacular as to be unmeasurable.
It’s going to be hard to count all the untruths in that single image – partly because some of them are falsehoods on several different levels – but we’ll try.
Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran is quoted in the Herald today presenting the award of £300m of contracts for the navy’s innovative new aircraft-free aircraft carriers as a benefit of the Union, and continuing the well-worn scare story that the Clyde and Rosyth shipyards would close in an independent Scotland.
We’ve already dealt with that particular canard, so instead let’s look at the sums.
From a heavily-spun Huffington Post piece on Scotland’s relationship with the monarchy, in which Dennis Canavan expressing a personal opinion when asked a question becomes an “outburst”. You know the sort of thing. (The story was also reported in the Telegraph as “Yes camp in disarray”, before a hasty rewrite.)
It’s an interesting definition of “overwhelming majority”, we’ll grant you. But it might explain why the No campaign apparently thinks it has the referendum won already.
In an extraordinary outburst on TV last night, “Better Together” campaign chairman Alistair Darling accused Alex Salmond of exaggerating the amount of extractable oil in the Scottish sector of the North Sea by 1,200%.
The former Chancellor (who we learned a few weeks ago thinks the population of Scotland is six million, creating an impressive 705,000 imaginary Scots) suggested that rather than the 24 billion barrels currently estimated by the oil industry – and commonly cited by the UK government – there were in fact just 2 billion barrels left.
As BT are a tad wobbly with numbers, let’s do a quick bit of arithmetic on that.
A recurring source of amusement for the independence camp is the weekly reader poll in Scotland On Sunday. Time and again the surveys fall victim to deeply-implausible sudden surges in backing for the Unionist option, often in the middle of the night and usually after Yes supporters have drawn attention to less favourable standings.
(The paper’s deputy editor Kenny Farquharson once memorably tried to explain away 25,000 overnight votes – in a poll which had attracted about a tenth that many* in the entire preceding week – as having come from American and Canadian readers, all having inexplicably decided to vote at once on the same day.)
A fairly typical example of the phenomenon, from back in April, can be seen here, but the No campaign’s IT black-ops department appears to have suffered from a bit of an itchy trigger finger this morning and pushed the bounds of credibility a little too far.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
