This is the latest cinema ad from fake-grassroots campaign group “Vote No Borders”:
And below is why it’s a despicable, shameful lie.
Last night, in our 10pm “And finally” comedy slot, we ran a picture of a Labour election leaflet we’d slightly altered in order to make a joke about the party’s well-documented historic predilection for postal-vote electoral fraud. Readers can form their own view about whether the gag was funny or not, but it was at least clearly flagged as an “And finally” and we also pointed out that the pic was a fake in the comments.
We’ve been searching this morning’s Scotsman for a similar disclaimer regarding its front-page headline, but as yet we’re not having a lot of luck locating it.
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.
Monday:
(UK government “factsheet” issued by the Scotland Office.)
Wednesday:
“For the average mortgage in Scotland, there would be £5,400 more [in] mortgage payments a year.”
(George Osborne to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee.)
Yikes! What the hell happened on Tuesday?
Labour’s Douglas Alexander got himself in a right old pickle this weekend, at first claiming that the party’s new campaign around a poster about VAT referred to an annual bill of £450 for the average family, but then trying to backtrack in a panic and claim the sum was calculated over the entire period of the coalition government when it was pointed out to him that the figure was ludicrous.
Wings Over Scotland is of course dedicated above all to keeping the record straight, so our sinister network of shadowy cyber-agents got straight onto the case.
The Scottish independence debate is characterised by so many gigantic lies from the No camp and the media (no pound, international outcast, bankrupt, cataclysm, etc etc) that there’s rarely time to pick up on all the small, casual, offhand ones that also litter the news-stands and the airwaves and poison any hope of intelligent discourse.
So let’s make an effort with one, just by way of example.
Here’s the Scottish Labour finance spokesman Iain Gray on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, discussing Gordon Brown’s speech in Glasgow on pensions because Mr Brown himself refused to answer any questions about it.
As ever with Mr Gray, he packs a lot of entertainment into a short space of time.
This is the new “positive” campaign poster from “Better Together”:
There’s a lie in the picture, but it’s probably not the one you think.
From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:
So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?
As we launch our exciting 12-part beginner’s guide to debunking the No campaign’s scaremongering strategy with a piece on the currency issue, a document sent in this morning by an alert reader couldn’t have come at a more timely moment.
It’s a letter written five weeks ago by Bill Munro, the elderly owner of holiday firm Barrhead Travel, which calls itself “the UK’s Number 1 Online Travel Agent”.
As you can see, it outlines a quite extraordinary apocalyptic scenario in the event of a Yes vote (“we would not be able to trade outwith Scotland for at least 3 years”), as part of a thinly-veiled diatribe aimed at frightening the company’s almost 500 employees into a No vote on pain of losing their jobs.
And even leaving aside the fact that it’s barking mad, the letter illustrates one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign – for all that people clamour and plead for “more information” about independence, information is only any good if people actually listen to it.
Well, this is the month of the Mad March Hare, we suppose.
First we had Bernard Ponsonby telling us that the referendum was a choice between independence and a completely imaginary “more powers” option. Next up was Hamish Macdonell in the Spectator, oddly hallucinating that David Cameron had announced “devo max” when in fact he’d announced devo nothing at all.
At the weekend (and, we suspect, all this week) there were journalists insisting that Johann Lamont was offering Scots major advances devolution when in fact she was essentially offering the 2009 Calman Commission with a new ribbon tied on it.
But the winner is surely David Torrance in today’s Herald.
Our emphasis. But, um…
Here’s a “Better Together” spokesman on Alex Salmond’s New Statesman lecture:
We were there. Want to know what he actually said about England?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
