Wings Over Scotland

It’s not often that you see the same story on the front page of the i and the Financial Times. It’s even rarer – in fact, perhaps unprecedented – if that story’s about Scotland, because the otherwise-admirable mini-tabloid is barely even aware that there’s a part of the UK north of Newcastle.

(Its parent paper, the Independent, is we think unique among national UK newspapers in not even having a Scotland section, let alone a Scottish edition.)

So when it happens, you know it must be a pretty darned significant story – one which the Scottish press will be all over like a swarm of wasps at a jam-factory picnic. Right?

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Yesterday the UK government put out what was even by its standards a ludicrously hyperbolic piece of scaremongering about the costs of independence, suggesting that to set up all the governmental bodies the new state would require might come with an eye-watering price tag of £2.7 billion.

Its citing of the London School of Economics made it particularly interesting to hear what Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE actually said about the figures.

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Alert followers of our Twitter feed will have learned over recent months that we have a seriously uncanny ability to influence the outcome of football matches. Need your side to grab a couple of quick goals? Just get us to tweet “Team X looks like they couldn’t score if they played till next Thursday” and get ready to watch the net bulge.

(One day we’ll reveal the size of the bribe we took from a shady consortium of wealthy Hamilton Accies fans during the SPFL playoff against Hibs on Sunday.)

And now it looks like that talent has extended itself to newspapers.

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While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.

We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.

But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.

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There’s been a fair bit of crowing from “Better Together” about some recent poll results. Which is fair enough – almost everybody likes to shout when they get some good news (though this site has consistently urged caution over polling findings months before a vote, whether favourable or not).

It is, however, always wise to look at the small print.

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We suppose we should at least commend the “Vote No Borders” campaign for a certain level of frankness. While their output is little different to the daily hysterical fearmongering of “Better Together”, at least they don’t try to pretend that it’s “positive”.

Sadly, when it comes to the relationship their assertions have with the truth, however, they’re singing very much from the same hymn sheet.

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Several of today’s papers run with the story that in giving evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in Westminster, George Osborne yesterday made the claim that Scots could run out of cash under independence, as Scottish banks would no longer be able to print their own pound notes guaranteed by the Bank of England.

Osborne’s argument is that Scottish notes are accepted as currency in the UK under the Banknote (Scotland) Act of 1845. However, this legislation would no longer apply after independence without a currency union, thereby making Scots notes worthless.

In what was an oddly nervous and evasive performance before the Committee – despite its extremely friendly questioning – it was one of the Chancellor’s stranger assertions.

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It’s been fascinating to watch the media slyly turning Chris and Colin Weir’s quite understandable objection to being defamed by loathsome right-wing newspapers and MSPs into an attack on “cybernats”.

But this morning Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph – who we rarely read even for laughs now, so far gone is his grasp on reality – added a particularly deft twist which we thought worthy of note for those who like to study how the press does its business.

And yes, we entirely meant that double entendre.

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The Scotland Office has today released yet another taxpayer-funded (though we’re not allowed to know how much) document about how rubbish and useless Scotland is. Issued in the name of Alistair Carmichael, it reheats and repeats all the same lines from the previous papers, but this time dumbed down a bit for thickos.

You’d think that having been churning out the same thing for two years, the UK government would have at least managed to get its story straight by now.

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The Sunday Mail has a surprisingly low-key piece today about a new opinion poll commissioned by the paper through the little-known pollster Progressive Partnership (who aren’t a member of the British Polling Council) and conducted by YouGov.

Oddly, it seems to have produced two very different sets of results.

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There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.

So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.

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A phenomenon we’ve reported on numerous times on this site is the strange way that the media will regard the same opinion-poll statistics in radically different ways depending on how the figures relate to their political agenda.

So if 65% of Scots say they think Alex Salmond is a swell and trustworthy guy, the headline will be “MORE THAN A THIRD OF SCOTS DON’T TRUST SLIPPERY SALMOND”. Conversely, if those numbers are reversed on a referendum poll, the banner lead will be “ONLY A THIRD OF SCOTS BACK SEPARATION”.

But there are other ways of misrepresenting numbers, too.

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