We know that the media isn’t normally shy about identifying which side of the Scottish independence debate people are on, especially if they’ve been behaving badly.
So we were a little puzzled by the papers this morning.
Alert readers may recall that a few days ago we queried a dubious-sounding statistic from Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, who claimed that “50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read“.
We didn’t think that could be right, and dug up some figures suggesting that it was nonsense, but of course “the poorest kids” is a highly-flexible metric. Strictly speaking you could just mean the two poorest children in the country, and if one of those two can’t read there’s your 50%.
Luckily, we’ve now had some meat put on the bones of that claim.
A story in the Scotsman tonight reports how the Scottish Parliament’s independent research body SPICE has found – contrary to long-running claims from Labour – that the Scottish Government has OVER-funded the eight-year Council Tax freeze.
And that’s all very well, but not exactly stop-the-presses stuff – nobody reading this site is going to be terribly surprised at Scottish Labour being caught out in a lie. But the party’s house newspaper the Daily Record went for a subtly different angle on the story that did manage to provoke us to raise an eyebrow.
So we weren’t expecting this. The Telegraph have sent us a reply after we complained to IPSO about this. It’s worth a read, so we thought we’d let you see it.
Reporting on the election of Kezia Dugdale as Scottish Labour’s sixth leader in eight years, the BBC quotes her as saying “We are changing. I am part of a new generation. Someone without the baggage of the past”.
Keen followers of First Minister’s Questions will doubtless be excited to witness the weekly jousts, as the dynamic new regime of Kezia Dugdale sweeps out the tired old broom of Labour’s previous FMQs inquisitor, er, Kezia Dugdale.
Curiously, while the BBC was present and broadcasting live at the announcement of the new leader and deputy, neither’s acceptance speech was broadcast on TV, radio or online, which may well have surprised viewers and listeners who’ve become used to 50-minute prime-time Gordon Brown “intervention” specials.
In Dugdale’s case, our best guess is that the BBC didn’t want to have to fact-check it.
Last night we ran a piece about a story in last week’s Daily Record in which a Scottish Labour official was given free rein to make an extended political attack on the SNP in the guise of a “business student” from the University of the West of Scotland, without his Labour identity being revealed, on the flimsy basis of a petition about college cuts with a few hundred signatures.
As it happens, another UWS student also has a petition doing the rounds at the moment. But it got treated rather differently by the Scottish press.
There’s a very strange feature in today’s Daily Record, and it’s not even one of their regular pieces of pioneering and hard-hitting investigative journalism about who’s the hottest guest ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.
The headline screams unequivocally that according to a new Survation poll, fear of the SNP influencing a Labour government was the reason that English voters swung back to the Conservatives, defying polls that said the Tories would be the largest party but be short of an overall majority.
(Weirdly it says that their goal in doing so was to “keep Salmond out of power”, even though (a) Alex Salmond is a humble backbench MP who doesn’t even lead the SNP group at Westminster, let alone the party, and (b) he won his seat anyway.)
The article then produces a flurry of graphs and figures showing that various numbers of supporters of the four UK parties switched their votes to various other parties after being polled (as always happens).
But then there’s something quite important missing.
On Wednesday we highlighted a curious outbreak of mass hysteria in the Scottish press, when a whole clutch of its newspapers suddenly and inexplicably jumped on a six-month-old story that had been comprehensively debunked at the time and hadn’t become any more true.
The story was swiftly proven to be complete rubbish all over again, and some of the papers printed grudging and much less prominent pieces admitting it was nonsense (all gallantly blaming their source, some Buckingham Palace flunky gone rogue, rather than their own failure to check the facts).
And then things got weird.
We’ve noted on more than one occasion that the spectacular SNP surge since the referendum appears to have completely unhinged much of the Scottish and UK press. Having pumped out a vast avalanche of hysterical coverage which utterly failed to stop the Scottish electorate returning 56 SNPs out of 59, the papers have responded to the rebuff by simply turning the volume up.
But even by those standards, today has been special.
Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:
The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.
Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.
(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)
A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.
In its kneejerk “SNP BAD” reaction to the Alistair Carmichael affair, the Unionist establishment – politicians and media alike – has furiously tried to divert attention from Carmichael’s smear and attempted cover-up by harking back to an incident in 2012, when the press gave vast amounts of coverage to a claim that Alex Salmond had “lied” about legal advice regarding an independent Scotland’s EU membership.
Everyone and their dog has trotted out the allegation again in the past week, right across the Unionist political spectrum – “Steerpike” in the Spectator did it, Alex Johnstone of the Scottish Conservatives did it, Tavish Scott of the Scottish Lib Dems did it, Michael White in the Guardian did it, Toby Young in the Spectator (again) did it, thirsty Labour peer George Foulkes did it, Telegraph columnist Iain Martin did it, failed Lib Dem anti-Salmond candidate Christine Jardine did it, and countless numbers of shrill Scottish Labour activists and party officials did it.
And all of them are counting on the Scottish public not remembering the truth.
Amazingly enough, the Scottish press today ISN’T wall-to-wall with stories about Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, UK peer and lawmaker, endorsing the “f***ing booting” of Conservative supporters at the weekend, in a striking contrast to when a young SNP candidate said similar but less offensive things some months ago.
(Lord McConnell’s friends were talking in the future tense about something they would do. Mhairi Black was talking in the past tense, about things which she HADN’T done.)
As far as we’ve seen, the small piece above in the Scottish Sun is the only coverage. (The Daily Record, as well as not reporting the McConnell comments at all, actually has another go at Mhairi Black instead.)
But we were having trouble recalling any “hate-filled violent mobs” (McConnell’s actual full quote) on the Yes/SNP side. And so was an alert reader who had a dig through the papers from the last couple of years.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
