You may have read today that “Better Together” is planning a major “newspaper-style” leaflet drive for the release of the White Paper next week. Thanks to our ever-alert spies in the No camp, we’ve managed to secure a leaked copy of the text. You can read it below.
Let’s make this one as short as possible. This week’s latest comedy FEARBOMB from the No camp (well, one among many) was a topically Doctor Who-themed repeat of one of their classics – “You won’t get the BBC after independence”.
We pulled that one apart in detail almost a year ago, but let’s see if we can boil it right down to the bare undisputed facts for easy quick reference.
Keen media watchers could have been forgiven for stifling a yawn this week as the Scottish press leapt eagerly on a think-tank report which bravely professed itself able to see no less than half a century into the future of the Scottish economy.
The Scotsman’s take was fairly typical. But it had a certain ring of deja vu.
Remember how the No camp is conducting a positive campaign, and definitely NOT saying that Scotland is too wee, too poor and too stupid to thrive as an independent country, and that only evil cybernats ever suggest that they’re saying that?
Here’s Danny Alexander on Sky News this morning. We’re not sure he got the memo.
Sadly we don’t have the ability to capture video here. Or rather, we don’t have the technical knowhow, or the time to acquire it. That’s not usually a problem, because we can capture audio and often other people more savvy than us will archive video clips before they vanish into the inaccessible vaults of broadcasting forever.
Sometimes, though, sound alone just doesn’t properly convey the tone of something. And since we suspect the seven-minute interview Alistair Darling gave BBC News this lunchtime will never be seen in full again [EDIT: Yes it will!], as rolling news doesn’t usually appear on iPlayer, we thought we had to capture it some other way.
Something rather odd happened over on our Facebook page this week. It’s the most sparsely-populated outpost of the Wings empire, (because it’s mostly just links to articles here), and the average post there is doing well if it’s seen by 2000 people and gets five or six comments.
But yesterday, after running this article, we thought it might be fun to turn the two maps into one of our celebrated series of “leaked Better Together posters”, so we quickly knocked up this image and posted it on the Facebook page accompanied only by the words “Another Union dividend”:
And then things went a bit mad.
Last month saw a return of one of the No camp’s favourite scare stories – that an independent Scotland would be unable to defend itself against terrorists. (As usual, no consideration was given to the notion that a Scotland with a non-aggressive foreign policy would be far less likely to be the target of terrorism in the first place.)
An unusually balanced and thoughtful piece in today’s Scotsman trashes the UK government report’s findings on purely practical and technical grounds. But there are rather more inspiring and positive reasons for doing so too.
This week, the University and College Union (UCU) have set out their manifesto for higher and further education in anticipation of the independence referendum. It denounces the funding system preferred by the big three Westminster parties and offers full backing to the Scottish Government’s policy of free tuition, while calling for immigration changes in order to support students and academics coming from abroad to study and work in Scotland.
“It is right that students who benefit from higher-than-average incomes should pay something back, but they should do so through progressive income tax,”
“Business depends on graduates and should make a contribution rather than receiving tax breaks. Higher education should be substantially paid for through general taxation.”
“Scotland does not have great concerns about an immigration influx and should relax rules which could lead to greater recruitment of students, though they may be put off by negative perceptions of the UK system.”
While the report doesn’t say so explicitly, these views put the UCU clearly on the Yes side – immigration and taxation would continue to be powers reserved to Westminster in the event of a No vote, and the prevailing political climate in England (particularly the south) suggests a very different direction of travel.
Alistair Darling is in full Private Frazer mode over on the “Better Together” website today with his campaign’s latest variant on the timeless “too wee, too poor, too stupid” theme. Allow us to save you some time by stripping the entire 1000-word rant down to its three core paragraphs:
“Scotland has run a net fiscal deficit in 20 of the past 21 years. This suggests that over this period North Sea Oil receipts would have been required to fund public services in Scotland rather than being invested in an oil fund.
Faced with the fact that Scotland’s oil taxes are needed to fund Scotland’s public services, John Swinney made a decision that alter the terms of the independence debate forever. He made it clear on Good Morning Scotland that he favoured borrowing money to pay into an oil fund.
Borrowing to save is such a daft idea that it leads you back to the conclusion that to set up an oil fund they would have little choice but to raise taxes or cut spending. “
Contained within those few short lines is so much misinformation that it’s going to take rather longer to pull it all apart and see what the former Chancellor is trying to conceal, so let’s get straight to it. We don’t even have time for a picture.
This really happened today.
Read it for yourself by clicking the pic. (No Mail Online traffic will be generated.)
It’s the “catastrophic” that makes it special.
In a piece entitled “Scottish Labour leader says nationalism is a virus”, the Courier yesterday reported that Johann Lamont’s speech to the Labour conference “appeared to allude to the European 20th century fascist movement”.
And it did, although perhaps not in the way the Courier probably meant.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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