Wings Over Scotland

Despite the strikingly unequivocal nature of David Trimble’s clarification yesterday of his comments about the independence referendum’s potential impact on Northern Irish politics, remarkably the media are today still trying to spin them into a dire warning about a Yes vote causing renewed violence in the province.

The picture below is a page from this morning’s Sunday Times.

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BBC Northern Ireland website, 2 May 2014:

“Former NI First Minister Lord Trimble has said the biggest threat to peace in Northern Ireland would be if Scotland were to vote for independence.”

Lord Trimble on “Good Morning Scotland”, 3 May 2014 (31m 30s):

“I want to correct what you said… [the website] reported me as saying that would threaten the peace process. I did not say that, that is not my view.

Actually, a Yes vote in Scotland would reinforce the argument against violence, because it’s a demonstration of how you can achieve major change through the political democratic process.”

Whoops, eh? Oddly, while the original story is still on the BBC NI website, we can’t seem to find one reporting the correction anywhere, even though Lord Trimble spoke to GMS more than eight hours ago. We’re sure it’ll be along any minute now.

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If you’ve ever found yourselves in a situation where you’re dating someone from the hardcore militant wing of vegetarianism, readers, you’ll know that their life – and by extension yours – quickly becomes defined by what’s missing.

Whether shopping or going out to a restaurant or a surprisingly large number of other things, hazards you’d never previously imagined loom menacingly everywhere. Veggie “beanburgers” often apparently contain unadvertised cheese, innocent-looking sweeties turn out to be glazed with beeswax, and so on.

But soon you familiarise yourself with the “everything-free” aisle in supermarkets, where much more expensive facsimiles of normal foodstuffs – now bereft of dairy, gluten, sugar and goodness knows what else – reside, leaving you to wonder over the mysteries of the sinister-sounding unheard-of substances they’ve replaced them with.

And increasingly, so it is with politics.

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The estimable James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop! wrote an excellent blog post the other day deconstructing a laughably skewed and leading poll which was commissioned by “Better Together” this month.

Blair McDougall’s Beleaguered Billy Boys, as hardly anyone calls them, had loudly and bizarrely trumpeted figures which actually showed a 6% swing to Yes, but that wasn’t the thing we found most interesting in their press release.

“In what is another blow to the SNP, just 35% of those questioned by YouGov on behalf of Better Together backed separation over a stronger Scottish Parliament within the UK.”

The poll question had in fact offered respondents a forced choice between two options: independence or “Scotland remaining part of the UK with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament”. (Which meant, among many other quirks which made the findings nonsensical, that the roughly 10% of people who want Holyrood abolished altogether got lumped in with the “increased powers” side as the least-worst option.)

We’ve already learned what BT mean by “increased powers” – the piddly and trivial ones enshrined by the Scotland Act 2012, rather than any dramatic new settlement from any of the Unionist parties, but the jarring part of the release is the twisting of that already-twisted wording to mean “stronger”.

Because a stronger Scottish Parliament is the LAST thing the No parties want, and you only have to spend a minute thinking about it to figure out why.

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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.

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The chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, Bertie Armstrong, was reported in yesterday’s Press & Journal as saying that a vote for independence would leave Scotland with a weaker voice in the EU, as it would only have seven votes in the Council of EU Ministers, compared to the UK’s 29 votes.

(Which it would likely retain even in the event of losing 5.3 million of its citizens, due to the Treaty of Nice favouring the six largest countries: Germany, France, Italy and the UK all have 29 votes, while Spain and Poland have 27 each; the next largest is the Netherlands with only 13, even though the difference between their population size and Poland’s is exactly the same as that between Poland’s and the UK’s).

But Mr Armstrong seems to be having a problem with his arithmetic.

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The pitch:

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With the Scottish Parliament on a two-week break, it appears to have fallen to the Telegraph to take on the role of Johann Lamont this Thursday.

Scottish Labour’s regional manager has recently been under the curious impression that the most pressing issue on the minds of the people of Scotland is the fine detail of the First Minister’s hotel bill during a trip to America to promote the Ryder Cup in 2012, and the Telegraph seems equally obsessed.

But that dramatic splash isn’t quite what it seems.

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As far as we’re aware, “the largest arts festival in Europe” (indeed, the largest arts festival anywhere in the world) is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Does anyone remember Ian Murray MP being in charge of it?

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“Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling is in today’s Telegraph, yet again demanding that people should be prevented from expressing opinions on the internet, unless those opinions are supportive of the Union. In Mr Darling’s world, businessmen should be permitted to try to frighten their employees into voting No with mad, untrue rants and veiled threats that they’d be voting themselves onto the dole, but anyone responding to the threat with “Shut up, grandad” must be censored and silenced.

So far, so ho hum – if Unionist politicians are whining about “cybernats”, there must be a Y in the day, is the general rule. But as we can see above, the former Chancellor wasn’t the only Labour MP bleating about terrible Nat bully boys today.

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Major kudos to the hyper-alert reader who covertly recorded the Q&A session after last night’s event in Glasgow where Alistair Darling was interviewed by James Naughtie.

Obviously it’s not exactly broadcast-quality, but it’s perfectly audible for all but the occasional couple of seconds. We were going to catalogue all the flat-out lies Mr Darling told in the 51 minutes, but frankly the “Better Together” chairman was on autopilot and you’ve heard all the untruths – and their respective debunkings – a dozen times before on this site alone.

So while we see if we can summon up the mental stamina to wade through them all yet again, just watch and see how many you can spot for yourselves.

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This sort of thing just won’t do at all, STV.

Because that closing comment isn’t true, is it?

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