Wings Over Scotland

The Tories blow £110,000 on tea and biscuits in a single department in three months:

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Alex Salmond pays for two cups of tea and two Caramel Wafers out of his own pocket and makes £1m profit in a single afternoon:

Is it any wonder the canny Scottish people would rather have the clever First Minister running their country than the hapless Tories?

So another 24 hours go by, and still absolutely nobody in the Scottish media thinks it at all newsworthy that the country's main opposition party has a deliberate policy of refusing to support ANY Parliamentary motion put forward by the SNP, regardless of its merits. We wish we were more surprised.

Scotland Tonight, which at least engages with its viewers on Twitter, claimed its reporting team were "not excited" by the astonishing revelation, openly and publicly made by a Labour MP, that Scotland's second-biggest political party was more interested in party advantage than the interests of the people. Newsnight Scotland and Reporting Scotland both ignored the story, as did all of the nation's newspapers.

The Herald and Scotsman did both run tiny pieces on the less-interesting prelude that brought the news to light (Labour's ham-fisted refusal to vote against George Osborne's 50p tax cut for the rich), but neither could find even half a sentence in passing to mention the much more significant discovery of the Bain Principle.

The other story covered by Wings over Scotland yesterday DID manage to secure a lot more media attention, though. Following on from the Telegraph and Caledonian Mercury, both Scottish broadsheets were able to find large amounts of space to repeat the powderpuff story about Alex Salmond offering a couple of long-standing SNP members a cup of tea and a biscuit in Bute House.

The Herald put it on the front page – in a piece so poorly researched and edited that it managed to knock £30m off the value of the Weirs' Euromillions jackpot (repeatedly giving the amount as £131m rather than the actual £161m) – and presented the story as dramatically as possible, giving plenty of space to Labour's Paul Martin to make lurid accusations which the paper depicted neutrally (Martin merely "said" things) while it portrayed the SNP spokesman's response as angry and defensive, using phrases like "The First Minister's most senior aide stormed…" and "reacted with fury" .

The Scotsman, meanwhile, outdid its rival with TWO separate stories, featuring on the front page of the website and as the lead item in each of the "Scotland", "UK" and "Politics" sections. And this, remarkably, happened despite the paper also running a leader column which explicitly noted that the Weirs' donation did NOT belong in the same category as those that have been solicited and/or covered up by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems:

"At the heart of this affair there is a serious problem for political parties. They need money to run expensive campaigns. People who give large sums of money tend to be those who do not hand over cash without expecting something in return. There are people who simply believe in the party cause – the lottery winners who have given £1m to the SNP, for example – but they are few and far between."

It probably goes without saying that the Daily Record also managed to cover the Weirs' so-called "tea party", and it also ran it twice – though it should be noted that both pieces were handled rather more soberly and even-handedly than either of its two supposedly more grown-up counterparts – but didn't consider either Willie Bain's admission or Labour's tax-rate abstention to be worthy of even a few lines.

Supporters of independence are often accused of paranoia by the Scottish media, but no belief is paranoid if it's true. The embarrassingly transparent attempt by the press to bury the story of the Bain Principle, while devoting page after page after page to repeatedly casting aspersions on an entirely legitimate, open and above-board donation which the SNP conspicuously announced the moment it happened and which absolutely everyone accepts was not made with any ulterior motive or seeking any benefit, will do nothing but fuel the nationalists' fire.

As the fallout from Cruddasgate continues, it's instructive to watch the attempts of both the Unionist parties and the media to drag the SNP through the mud along with the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems. The print and online media have both had a stab today, with the Telegraph running a lengthy piece about Alex Salmond inviting lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir for a cup of tea at Bute House before they made a £1m donation to the SNP, and the Caledonian Mercury picking up the same story as part of a Hamish Macdonell op-ed.

The latter is the more interesting, on account of a couple of somewhat contradictory paragraphs in it. About halfway down the column, Macdonell makes this assertion:

"The issue here is not the money or where it comes from. The issue here is the nature of what is being promised by the parties in return for these donations."

And it's a very fair point. Nobody sensible is objecting to people giving money to political parties in itself. Donations are absolutely vital to the continued functioning of our political system as it stands. There are (deeply unpopular) arguments to be made about changing that system to one of public funding, and there are arguments against having political parties (rather than individual members) at all, but neither scenario is currently the case, so parties need donations. Nothing wrong with that.

As Macdonell correctly points out, the issue is whether those donations are being used to influence policy in favour of vested (usually commercial) interests. But if that's the case, what are the Weirs doing in the story? Macdonell's demand that:

"If the UK’s most successful lottery winners are invited in for tea with the first minister before offering the SNP a huge donation, that should be declared."

…makes no sense in the stated context of influence being the issue. There's no suggestion that the Weirs sought to influence any SNP policy. As former SNP activists it's probably fair to assume that they already support most of the party's aims, and it's hard to see what benefit they could possibly be seeking in return, being as they're already sitting on a bank account with 160 million quid in it.

We have no argument with the broad thrust of the CalMerc piece. We're all in favour of transparency when it comes to donations. But then, the SNP made no secret of the Weirs' donation – indeed, it'd be fair to say they shouted it from the rooftops. So whether the First Minister entertained them to a cuppa and a Caramel Wafer beforehand is neither here nor there. Actively soliciting contributions is not in itself the slightest bit underhand – every party does it openly every day.

The Weirs have no place in any story about dodgy donations. They are not a business, and are not seeking favours in return for their money. They are Scottish citizens and residents, not foreigners prohibited by law from giving money to politicial parties. And the First Minister, it seems, actively sought them out, rather than them paying for access to him in order to lobby the Scottish Government for their own ends.

But just as with the expenses scandal, the forces of Unionism will not be dissuaded by such trivialities as the relevant facts as they try to haul the SNP into the pit of sleaze alongside the London parties. As ever, we recommend reading the pro-Union press – if you must read it at all – through a very long lens.

It won’t have come as any surprise to SNP supporters that the media – the same one that devoted hundreds of column inches to misrepresenting Joan McAlpine’s “anti-Scottish” comments on Twitter – was today absolutely silent on Labour MP Denis McShane’s comparison of Alex Salmond to Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

MacShane, who voted in favour of the Iraq War, hasn’t deleted the tweet, despite a storm of protest on Twitter. But he’s only the latest in a long line of Unionist politicians to compare Scotland’s democratically elected First Minister (who as far as we know isn’t implicated in a single death) to murderous genocidal dictators.

Labour in particular are fond of crying about the nasty cybernat “bullies” who occasionally call Labour politicians names online, but those are pseudonymous internet users with not a shred of evidence that any of them are members of – or even vote for – the SNP. We’re not aware of any elected Nat representative or even pro-independence journalist ever having likened Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Ed Miliband to Hitler, but the brave defenders of the Union have no such scruples. MacShane is merely the latest in a long and ignoble line, so we thought it’d be a good idea to keep track and see if we can get a full house.

Read the rest of this entry →