Wings Over Scotland

It’s weird watching the Sunday papers all decrying the media’s handling of Wednesday’s leaked Scottish Government document. Everyone seems to agree that the Cabinet paper wasn’t any kind of smoking gun – the consensus is that John Swinney’s comments were sensible, cautious and largely misrepresented in the press.

Eddie Barnes in Scotland on Sunday, for example, noted that “Few of the issues presented within the report were in any way revelatory” (though it didn’t stop him from referring to them as “revelations” later in the piece anyway), but then diffidently observed that they “produced a disastrous set of headlines”, as if his own publication hadn’t written any of them, and as if it wasn’t continuing to do so on the very same day Barnes’ piece hit the newsstands.

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We’ve just had to have a bit of a sit down after trying in vain to get our heads around the dizzying spin deployed in a story in this morning’s Herald, which appears to utilise some form of crazed Catch 22 to ensure that no matter whether an independent Scotland was stony broke or rolling in cash, it’d still end up skint.

We’ll give you a moment to guess who wrote it, and then we’re going to step through the piece line by line and see if we can figure out what sort of madness is afoot.

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From the Luxembourg newspaper Wort.lu on Tuesday:

“Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister has backtracked on a comment about Scotland’s independence which was quoted in the British media, saying it was misinterpreted.“

From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

“The minister’s spokesman has made clear to the BBC that he has ‘no problems’ with our reporting of his remarks.” (column 3)

Hmm, that’s a tricky one.

We think the Scotsman may finally have jumped the shark this morning. A piece by Scott Macnab (which we’re not going to link to, but have made a local copy of) on the No campaign’s year-old “decoy dossier” from yesterday is so extraordinarily, laughably biased and transparently dishonest that it couldn’t see even the most distant edges of decent, honourable journalism with the Hubble Space Telescope.

It is, however, just the most nakedly partisan of a series of Scottish newspaper headlines and lead stories this morning that once and for all give the lie to the notion that the country is served by anything remotely resembling a fair and balanced media.

We’ve spoken a few times of the “swarm of wasps” approach to large-scale lying that’s frequently deployed by the anti-independence movement. But this week’s desperate, co-ordinated, all-fronts onslaught on truth is more akin to a sudden mass infestation of hundreds of nasty, disease-ridden little bugs, trying to be too many to stamp on.

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When someone sent us the image below on Twitter, we actually went to the “Better Together” Facebook page to verify it was real, because it can be hard to tell the No campaign’s real leaflets and posters from satire. But it’s totally genuine.

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The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

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Well, this is odd.

“A recovery in North Sea oil and gas investment is set to generate £100bn of economic stimulus and hand the Chancellor a £25bn bonus through extra tax receipts, new figures showed on Monday.”
(The Telegraph, 25 February 2013)

“An independent Scotland would begin with a £4 billion black hole in its finances due to a fall in oil revenues, UK Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said yesterday.”
(The Scotsman, 2 March 2013)

Looks like that Reverse Perception Field at the border is still working, then.

First the lies (from the print-only editions of today’s Daily Mail):

And then the truth, from our own Scott Minto a week ago.

Decide for yourself who to believe.

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(Apologies to Chomsky and Herman.)

A standard-issue scare story in the Scotsman today was cast in an interesting light following an email we received last night from an alert reader, who’d been contacted by “a business owner in Moray” after the latter received an unsolicited communication from the official “Better Together” campaign.

We’ll let the reader tell the rest of the story.

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Sorry, readers. It’s our fault. Around teatime on Sunday we rather recklessly tweeted “Is Magnus Gardham on holiday? The Herald’s been a much more balanced paper this last week or two”, and in doing so appear to have summoned him back, Candyman-style, despite only saying his name once. It must have been retweets or something.

Gardham’s sticky fingerprints are all over the Herald’s front-page splash this morning, even though he shares the byline with the now-rarely-seen Robbie Dinwoodie. The piece reports a TNS-BMRB poll showing a rather remarkable 2.5% swing towards independence since October – despite that period being depicted uniformly across the Scottish and UK political media as a quarterium-annus horribilis for the Yes campaign, and for the SNP and Alex Salmond in particular – under the extraordinarily contrived headline “Blow to SNP as support for independence stalls”.

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