Wings Over Scotland

Attentive viewers will recall this blog’s investigative journalism of last month, when we went searching for Scotland’s most prominent missing person – Scottish Labour’s alleged leader Johann Lamont. We were so concerned about her sudden dramatic disappearance from the nation’s airwaves shortly after her election that we were prompted to start an ongoing daily log of all political appearances on the Scottish media, which a couple of you have even very kindly been helping us to maintain.

With the Scottish Parliament in recess for Easter and the first quarter of 2012 just over, it seemed a good time to take a look at the old scoreboard, and as for the results… well, you’ll have had bigger surprises, let’s put it like that.

8 APPEARANCES

Anas Sarwar (LAB)
John Swinney (SNP)

7 APPEARANCES

Ruth Davidson (CON)

6 APPEARANCES

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP)

5 APPEARANCES

Ken Macintosh (LAB)
Michael Moore (LIB)
Alex Salmond (SNP)

4 APPEARANCES

Margaret Curran (LAB)
Patrick Harvie (GRN)
David Mundell (CON)
Wille Rennie (LIB)
Humza Yousaf (SNP)

3 APPEARANCES

Douglas Alexander (LAB)
Christine Grahame (SNP)
Hugh Henry (LAB)
Cathy Jamieson (LAB)
Johann Lamont (LAB)
Shona Robison (SNP)
Jim Wallace (LIB)

2 APPEARANCES

Danny Alexander (LIB)
Willie Bain (LAB)
Jackson Carlaw (CON)
Nick Clegg (LIB)
Angela Constance (SNP)
Alistair Darling (LAB)
Kezia Dugdale (LAB)
Linda Fabiani (SNP)
Stewart Hosie (SNP)
Richard Lochhead (SNP)
Lewis Macdonald (LAB)
Derek Mackay (SNP)
Angus MacNeill (SNP)
Stewart Maxwell (SNP)
Jack McConnell (LAB)
Jeremy Purvis (LIB)
Richard Simpson (LAB)
Jo Swinson (LIB)

*We haven’t listed anyone who made only one appearance. It’s a bank holiday.

A pretty pitiful showing from the Scottish Labour leader, then, in a period which has seen many dramatic developments in Scottish politics you’d have thought she might want to comment on. Her last appearance was over a month ago (March 4th), and two of them came within two days of each other, with her only other showing being on BBC Scotland’s Newsnight debate way back in January.

Her deputy Anas Sarwar, on the other hand, has been far and away Labour’s most prominent face and voice, with 60% more appearances than the party’s next-most-frequent visitor to the broadcast studios, finance spokesman and unsuccessful leadership candidate Ken Macintosh.

Total appearances per party, incidentally, stack up like this for the listed figures above:

SNP 39 (+15 one-off appearances, total 54)
LAB 37 (+15, total 52)
LIB 16 (+6, total 22)
CON 9 (+16, total 25)
GRN 4 (+2, total 6)

Or put another way, that’s 60 TV and radio slots for pro-independence parties and 99 for anti-independence parties. Or 38% of airtime for the parties occupying 55% of Holyrood seats, and 62% for the parties holding the other 45%. The biggest beneficiaries of the pro-Union imbalance are the Lib Dems (who got almost four times as much representation as the Greens despite having only two-and-a-half times as many seats, and only fractionally less than the Tories despite the latter having three times as many MSPs) but all of the pro-Union parties get more coverage than they numerically merit, as do the Greens. Of all Scotland’s elected parties in the Parliament, only the SNP are under-represented by national broadcast media.

Representation by proportion of Holyrood seats, then, comes out as:

SNP: 34% of appearances (53% of seats) net result -19%
LAB: 33% appearances (29% seats) net +4%
LIB: 14% appearances (4% seats) net +10%
CON: 16% appearances (12% seats) net +4%
GRN: 4% appearances (2% seats) net +2%

*Figures rounded to nearest whole number, so don’t total exactly 100%

So that’s the Scottish political and media report card for the first session of 2012, and it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know – Anas Sarwar is the real face of Scottish Labour, Johann Lamont has made herself available for questioning less than any other leader, and the views of the electorate are not represented fairly by the country’s media, with the SNP (and more importantly, its voters) routinely discriminated against in favour of all three Unionist parties.

If you made it this far, join us again in the summer, when we suspect the story will be much the same.