Wings Over Scotland

In so far as there’s any actual reasoning or hard data supporting the Scotsman’s front-page lead story today at all, it’s when the American pundit Nate Silver claims that “Historically, in any Yes or No vote in a referendum, it’s actually the No side that tends to grow over time, people tend not to default to changing the status quo.”

Shall we just check whether that does indeed “tend” to be true, readers?

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Tonight saw the launch of “Better Together Bathgate”, the No camp’s debut foray into our beloved hometown. The email advertising the event, sent out on the 15th of July, said “I hope to see you at the on 28th June” [sic], which might help to explain the rather sub-spectacular turnout of around 40 hardy souls from a town of 16,000.

Of that 40 or so, several (perhaps as many as a quarter) were dastardly pro-Yes spies. And we know that for certain, because one of them was ours.

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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.

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It’s hard to know where to start on picking apart the torrent of misrepresentations, distortions and flat-out untruths that “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall was allowed to get away with in the space of a few short minutes during a rather powder-puff interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight.

So let’s just pick one at random and see how we get on.

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Yesterday we passingly mentioned how Home Secretary Theresa May this week claimed that Scots could lose their British passports and be denied dual nationality following a ‘Yes’ vote for independence in next year’s referendum.

Mystifyingly none of the newspapers reporting the story bothered to research the facts behind her claim, so we had to get our investigating hats on.

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Below is a short extract from an interview between Margaret Curran and BBC Radio Scotland’s Derek Bateman on Good Morning Scotland last week.

The whole thing is very much worth a listen, but this bit jumped out.

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If there’s one area where you really have to hand it to “Better Together”, it’s sheer shamelessness. Despite having been humiliatingly exposed for inflating attendance figures at their events by at least 100% twice on this site alone, to the great merriment of Yes campaigners, they just keep right on going without a hint of embarrassment.

We can’t help starting to wonder if this might all be one of those sort of “When I was going to St Ives…” trick riddle things. How many Darling Youth kids make 70?

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Alert readers may recall the anti-independence “Better Together” campaign’s rather, shall we say, enthusiastic approach to statistics. Earlier today we noticed them excitedly tweeting “Head count just done! About 600 at the launch of #bettertogether Edinburgh!”, and wondered if they might have once again been so kind as to provide a picture for purposes of verification. And bless them, they had.

If you’re looking at that shot and thinking that it’s certainly full but doesn’t look much like “about 600” people, you’re not alone. So we did a quick bit of investigating.

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We stumbled across this quite by accident yesterday. We think you’ll enjoy it.

The clip is from last year, and was aired on Canadian national news channel Sun News. Douglas Murray is a British writer who claims to be half-Scottish on account of unspecified links to Unionist breeding ground the Isle of Lewis, popular haunt of No-camp luminaries like Alistair Darling, virulent Labour anti-devolutionist Brian Wilson and controversial “Better Together” donor Ian Taylor.

Murray studied at Eton and Oxford and writes for august UK journals like the Spectator and Guardian, as well as appearing on numerous BBC political shows. For some reason, the Canadians consider him an expert on Scottish politics, qualified to inform and enlighten their viewers. See what you think.

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We already know that the No camp has, shall we say, a bit of difficulty when it comes to basic arithmetic. But rarely do they demonstrate it so eagerly as they did last night.

We very much appreciate their helping to make our job easier.

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So here’s a funny thing.

“Blair McDougall: We have said – I think Blair has said something similar as well – that we are acting as if PPERA applies to us at the moment, so we are carrying out checks on individuals who donate to us. We will disclose people who give more than £7,500 as per PPERA within a calendar year. I would also say categorically that we won’t accept any foreign donations.“ (Q.1819)

And here it is again, equally categorically:

And again for good measure:

“Better Together campaign director Blair McDougall, who was also appearing in front of the committee, said he would refuse to take cash from foreign donors, but would accept UK-wide donations up to £500.”

(Our emphases.) That’s pretty clear, then – the No campaign will not accept money from “foreign donors”, but will take “up to £500” from people resident in the UK.

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