Wings Over Scotland

Without setting out deliberately to be so, a site like Wings Over Scotland is inherently cynical. If you set yourself up to monitor the media, it’s implicit that you think the media needs monitoring. And as a professional journalist, both staff and freelance, for over 20 years, I’ve seen enough shady goings-on not to be shocked very often.

But today, for perhaps the first time since starting the site, I find myself genuinely filled with anger, disgust and contempt for the people plying my trade in Scotland.

Today’s Scotland On Sunday lead story isn’t even remotely close to the first time we’ve seen a Scottish newspaper cross the line from spin and smear into outright lie. It is, however, by a very considerable distance the most despicable.

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…is unfortunate, twice is careless, and three times in quick succession starts to look like a trend. Sober viewers may recall a post from a few days ago, in which we noted the latest example of the Herald’s increasingly-frequent habit of telling outright lies. It turns out that the formerly-respectable publication was being even more economical with the truth than we knew, as a tiny piece in a corner of today’s edition reveals*:

Still, it was nothing too serious. The original piece only exaggerated the number of turbines by around 400%, and the potential area to be covered by the new development by a trifling 3,300%. (In addition to suggesting that the land was to be sold off to private industry whereas in fact it was remaining in public ownership.) Apart from those few minor issues, the story was almost entirely accurate.

The Herald is currently circling the drain. We can’t imagine why.

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*We’re indebted to keen-eyed reader “McHaggis” for pointing out the correction to us.

This is what our dear old pal, the arch-loyal true-believer Scottish Labour activist Duncan Hothersall, appears to believe happened (or rather, didn’t happen) yesterday:

This is what actually did happen:

“Alex Salmond is quick to point to the high levels of welfare in Scandinavia but those universal benefits are paid for by high levels of taxation. Scotland cannot be the only something for nothing country in the world. And I will not tolerate a country where the poorest pay for the tax breaks for the rich.”
– Johann Lamont, 25 September 2012

We’re trying really hard, but for the life of us we can’t formulate an interpretation of those words that ISN’T saying universal benefits in Scotland are “something for nothing”, and that DOESN’T attack them on the grounds that they represent a subsidy of the rich by the poor. Can any keen students of doublethink help us out?

Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.

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From “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell, published in 1949:

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

From the Daily Record, 20 September 2012:

“Iain Duncan Smith promises more disabled benefits cuts in Scotland: the Work and Pensions Secretary was the man behind bringing in Atos, who have been criticised for humiliating fit-for-work tests.”

Atos Healthcare was first employed to conduct Work Capability Assessments on claimants of Incapacity Benefit (and other disability benefits) in October 2008, under the Labour government of Gordon Brown, when said Labour government introduced Employment Support Allowance in order to reduce the welfare bill by replacing the previous benefits with one that was, for most recipients, around a third lower.

A 2009 report by the Citizens Advice Bureau highlighted Atos’ tendency to find people unexpectedly fit for work, but Brown’s government took no action against the company.

Iain Duncan Smith has merely continued Labour policy, using the same company hired by Labour to carry it out. The Daily Record is attempting to nakedly rewrite history to excuse Labour from responsibility for a measure which hurts a great many Record readers. Unfortunately for the Record, people are watching.

We were frankly staggered today to see that the Herald is still determined to flog the dead and rotting horse that is the Martin Sime “scandal”. It had seemed that the paper had slunk away with its “exclusive” between its legs after the widespread contempt generated by the first story, but incredibly it seems doggedly insistent on destroying the remaining shreds of its journalistic integrity by digging the hole even deeper.

The original piece was written by the Herald’s new political editor Magnus Gardham, until recently a faithful servant of the staunchly Unionist and staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Record. Entitled “Salmond in secret push to obtain a devo max option”, the story didn’t present a scrap of evidence of Salmond doing anything, secretly or otherwise. In fact, it was fabricated almost entirely from empirical lies, from the headline down. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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After we wrote this morning’s piece on party membership figures, we thought it might be interesting to look into what we’d initially intended as a throwaway last-line joke. Disturbingly, what we found out was that even in a society so tightly regulated that you can be fined thousands of pounds for using the word “summer” in the wrong place or threatened with imprisonment for making rude comments on Twitter, it’s apparently completely legal for our politicians to tell us outright lies.

We’re not talking about matters of opinion or interpretation or spin here. We mean that as far as we can establish, our politicians can openly lie to us about empirical, measurable facts, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.

The thing that sparked our inquiry was Scottish Labour’s assertion on its Twitter page that it’s “Scotland’s largest political party”.

Now, as far as we can make out, that statement isn’t true in any meaningful sense whatsoever. In so far as it’s possible to establish, Scottish Labour has thousands fewer members than the SNP, collected 300,000 fewer votes in the last Scottish election, has fewer MSPs and fewer councillors than the SNP, and generates much less money. But that’s not really the point.

One reader suggested to us that the basis for the party’s claim is that it has more elected representatives than any other if you include Westminster MPs as well as Holyrood ones. While it’s stretching grammar to its breaking point to suggest that that constitutes being the “largest political party” in any sense that an average person would interpret the term, we can see how there’s just about a semantic defence.

But the point is that even if there wasn’t, there isn’t anything we could do about it.

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Attentive readers will know that here at Wings Over Scotland we’ve been exhaustively detailing the 32-year trailer campaign for the fabled “positive case for the Union“. Well, despite our cynicism it’s finally here – the “Better Together” website, launched today, has a whole page devoted to describing the positive case (or as they’d have it, the “+ve” case, which the page URL mischievously translates to “-ve”) in detail.

Stand by to be blown away.

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How’s that cross-party alliance for independence doing? Let’s ask the Scottish media!

GREENS
“Greens walk out on the Yes campaign” (Herald)
“Greens quash claims of ‘Yes Scotland’ walkout” (Holyrood magazine)

MARGO MACDONALD
“Margo MacDonald snubs ‘Yes Scotland’ campaign” (Scotsman)
“MacDonald ‘not leaving campaign’” (Herald)

SCOTTISH SOCIALISTS
“Yes Scotland heading for a right Royal bust-up as SSP break ranks” (Herald)
“As far as we are concerned we are fully part of the Yes campaign, and my attitude is that it has been a success.” (Herald)

Stay tuned for the latest developments!

We were intrigued by a piece we read on the Sunday Mail’s website today. It centred on last Thursday’s session of First Minister’s Questions, when Labour MSP Michael McMahon used (rather improperly) a constituency question to make a political attack on Alex Salmond. The FM slapped the question down, angrily noting that McMahon’s allegation about Salmond calling HMRC on behalf of Sir David Murray with regard to Rangers was categorically untrue, and later issuing a statement pointing out that his only call to HMRC came eight months AFTER Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte.

In the Mail’s story McMahon’s subsequent posture was full of bravado, insisting that he wasn’t about to apologise. “I stand by my comments and Alex Salmond knows they are true, as his response showed how much the truth gets under his skin”, he retorted, but what he said next demonstrated an admirably bold and inventive redefinition of the term “standing by my comments”. See if you can spot the difference.

FIRST MINISTER’S QUESTIONS VERSION:

“The First Minister was quick to call HMRC for his friend Sir David Murray“

“I STAND BY MY COMMENTS” VERSION:

“The First Minister has shown in the past that he is happy to come running to the aid of his bigwig friends when they are in trouble. For example, the way he tried to pressurise HMRC to apply special treatment in the wake of the damage caused to Rangers by his pal Sir David Murray.”

Keen students of the English language may have spotted a subtle alteration there. In the first version, Salmond was allegedly trying to use his influence for the benefit of Sir David Murray personally, on account of their supposed close friendship. In the second, the First Minister was allegedly trying to assist Rangers Football Club, owned by Craig Whyte, to recover from damage CAUSED BY Sir David Murray.

(This would presumably imply that Salmond was also a friend of Craig Whyte, an assertion which must be sailing fairly close to defamation in the current climate. And since Murray has repeatedly publicly claimed that both he and Rangers were “duped by” Whyte, it’s rather stretching the bounds of plausibility to imagine that Salmond could have been helping Whyte at Murray’s behest or on his behalf.)

Wings Over Scotland would like to applaud Michael McMahon for his bold and courageous refusal to back down on this issue, and that furthermore we’re standing by those comments when we point out that in fact he’s a contemptible liar who even lies about his lies in an impressive illustration of the fine art of meta-lying, in order to cover up what was in reality a weasel-worded and entirely craven retraction of them. And you can, or possibly can’t, quote us on that.

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Thursday night’s Question Time from Inverness saw Johann Lamont once again trot out the line that the independence referendum doesn’t offer Scotland its only realistic chance of escaping Tory government for the forseeable future. Once again, the Labour quasi-leader insisted (56m 50s) that the choice between independence and the Tories was a false one, and that her party provided a genuine ideological alternative to the right-wing neoliberal philosophy which has dominated UK politics since 1979.

Unfortunately, that’s a lie. And the really troubling thing about it is that it means NOBODY is speaking for the majority of the British population, which almost certainly means that no mainstream political party is interested in representing your views. Which, you might think, is a pretty odd way to be running a supposed democracy.

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Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

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