There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.
The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)
This should be interesting, then.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
analysis, scottish politics, stats
Sometimes it’s hard not to salute the Scottish media’s sheer dogged, implacable commitment to misinformation, even in the face of seemingly-impossible odds.
Yesterday’s fiasco at First Minister’s Questions, where Johann Lamont dug herself a great big hole while trying to smear a successful Scottish businessman and imply corruption where none existed, was so farcically absurd and ham-fisted that the Scotsman had to bite its tongue and report it with the headline “Apology demanded over Lamont’s SNP land deal claim”.
Even Newsnight Scotland couldn’t brush it off, with hapless Labour MSP James Kelly wheeled on as the sacrificial bam sent to bluster his way through some rather timid questioning from Gordon Brewer. But no such trifling concepts as basic journalistic integrity or competence were going to trouble Magnus Gardham at the Herald.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: flat-out liesmisinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics
As you can perhaps tell, we’re starting to run out of post titles referencing “1984” and the Ingsoc habit of rewriting newspaper versions of history to pretend that certain things which happened didn’t happen, and vice versa. Here’s today’s case in point:
Wait a minute – “shifts to”? Are we sure about that?
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, media, scottish politics
Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.
We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics, stats
Shall we keep track of some of the falsehoods printed by the Scottish and UK media today with regard to the Lord Ashcroft polling, and see which ones ever get corrected?
It seems like that’s the sort of thing we usually do, so we probably should.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: arithmetic failmisinformation
Category
analysis, media, scottish politics, stats
We know “Better Together” has a history of mangling statistics beyond all recognition, but today’s effort might just take the biscuit. Their Facebook page and Twitter feed still carries a graphic distorting the true findings of today’s Lord Ashcroft polling to a degree so spectacular as to be unmeasurable.
It’s going to be hard to count all the untruths in that single image – partly because some of them are falsehoods on several different levels – but we’ll try.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: arithmetic failflat-out liesmisinformation
Category
analysis, scottish politics, stats
STV this morning reports a speech to be given today by Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, in which she issues some blood-curdling warnings about the chaotic impact of independence on Scottish trade with the UK.
There are a couple of things Ms Davidson should probably know.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformationproject fear
Category
comment, disturbing, scottish politics
This site spends much of its time highlighting major outbreaks of misrepresentation, spin, distortion and outright lying in the Scottish and UK media. Readers will be aware that we very rarely find ourselves short of material.
Which means that we don’t often have time to report the small stuff.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformationsmears
Category
analysis, disturbing, media, scottish politics
We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.
We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: confusedmisinformation
Category
analysis, comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
Below is the headline of a story from this morning’s Independent.
We’ve read the article in question several times now looking for the supposed “bad news” for the Scottish First Minister, and we’re having no luck at all. Perhaps you can help us out with it, readers.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: misinformation
Category
comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics
