Scottish nationalists shouldn’t be angry with the media for ignoring them

Left Foot Forward

Concern that the mainstream media were ignoring them has helped nationalists reach out to young people on social media.

Concern that the mainstream media were ignoring them has helped nationalists reach out to young people on social media

The Herald has now come out in support of Scottish independence.

Whether it is a sign of things to come, or simply a clever move to up its circulation during the most important period in Scottish history for 300 years, the move seemed a significant one.

If nothing else, it disproves the widely held nationalist belief that the mainstream press are uniformly against them.

From ham-fisted coverage of Mark Carney’s currency speech to Andrew Marr pompously informing the first minister of Scotland that the country would struggle to join the EU, even outlets normally trusted by the Scottish left have become viewed as a weapon in the unionist camp’s war against independence.

But despite these concerns over media bias, support for independence has grown remarkably over the past few months, with a recent poll showing that a swing of just two per cent would be enough for a Yes Vote.

During the recent SNP conference in Aberdeen, Alex Salmond highlighted one of the differences between the two campaigns:

“The people are coming towards us. Political public meetings are being revived. Halls have been crowded… Last month the BBC finally discovered this grassroots campaign and tried to cover both sides of the debate. Their problem was that the No campaign struggled to find them any grassroots group to film – or even a single grassroot.”

The jibe hurts Better Together because it is true. No one has taken a lawnmower to the Unionist grassroots campaign; there was none growing to begin with.

And while the No campaign has wheeled out figures like Lord Robertson to make threats of cataclysm, Yes has side-stepped what it sees as the media’s deafness and attempted to meet the people of Scotland directly.

These town hall meetings – springing up across Scotland – are combined with a constant nationalist presence across social media.

Online platforms like Wings Over Scotland and Bella Caledonia are churning out well-written, heavily biased content to big audiences. Between them, these two have a bigger Twitter presence than Better Together. Yes has double that again.

These places provide a stage for Yes to refute unionist claims, and amplify their mistakes. Going on Twitter can feel like being back in the SNP conference.

When pro-union groups make a similar move it does not gather the same traction. Within hours of its launch, No Borders – a kind of unionist rival to the National Collective pro-Yes cultural group – was mired in controversy.

In fact critics questioned whether a group funded by a London-based, Conservative-donating millionaire (and coordinated by a London-based PR firm) could be considered either grassroots or Scottish at all.

Part of Better Together’s problem lies in its nature – it is much harder for a three-party coalition to offer a clear alternative to independence.

They may now have come together to form the Axis of Devo – but theirs is not a clear message that can be translated into 140 characters and spread across the internet.

Yes are particularly popular among young people and with 16 and 17 year olds awarded the vote for the first time in British history (around 100,000 have already registered), the internet is key to reaching them.

This is a problem for Better Together because it looks like the debate is becoming a battle between Yes – using modern communications to promise the future – and Better Together, promising more of the same, using the media of old.

Now none of this means Yes will or should win.

Better Together is still ahead in the polls and there are no guarantees the youth vote will swing it. Anyone who has ever seen a teenager on ketamine will know better than to conflate youth with energy.

But staying ahead in the polls should not be the only reason for Better Together to engage with the grassroots more – a vote for the union will mean very little if the public are voting because of the clear holes in the Yes camp’s message. A win driven by negatives will be no win at all.

So the nationalists may have been slightly paranoid in thinking the media was against them – and it may be too soon to start thinking of the online campaign as some sort of electronic indyfada.

But paranoid or not, it was this concern that drove energy into social media and helped them reach out to young people – something political parties across the spectrum have struggled with for years.

This rising support now seems to have brought the Herald on board, and there are claims that the Scottish Sun may have plans to follow suit.

In this sense the nationalists should not be angry with the media for ignoring them, but thankful. It was the press that set the cybernats free.

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116 Responses to “Scottish nationalists shouldn’t be angry with the media for ignoring them”

  1. Jeanne Tomlin

    Well, unlike you I am not a bald-faced liar, including your lies about what he said about Hillsborough. Anyone can go to his blog and see the truth about what he says there so I have no need to refute your lies further.

  2. Alec

    As some groupies of Wings Over Scotland seem to be having difficulties in distinguishing a lie from an accurate quotation of someone’s words, here’s the author’s own words on Hillsborough:

    I wish I didn’t have to write what I’m about to write. There’s no
    possible benefit to it for me. All it will bring me is hatred, abuse and
    threats, some from people whose feelings I care about. It won’t make
    any difference to anything, because only a handful of people will ever
    read it and most of those who do will be outraged by it. But I have to
    do it anyway. I’m trapped – trapped by conscience, trapped by sanity,
    and trapped by the words of the smartest, most perceptive writer who
    ever lived.

    “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” (George Orwell)

    On the 15th of April 1989, ninety-six people went to a football match
    and didn’t come home. They died in hideous scenes which were broadcast
    to the world and splashed across newspaper front pages, and they died as
    a result of a catastrophic combination of circumstances, which had any
    one of them not been present would have averted the disaster. Yet of all
    those factors, there’s one that nobody is allowed to talk about,
    despite the fact that it’s the one that actually killed every single
    victim.

    Damn everyone whose cowardice means that the burden of saying so has
    landed on someone as stupid, inappropriate and hopelessly ill-equipped
    for the task as me.

    Warning: the following piece contains distressing images.

    I haven’t seen the death certificates of the 96 victims of
    Hillsborough. But I’m going to make an assertion anyway, without fear of
    contradiction – not a single one of them lists the cause of death as
    “incompetence” or “inexperience”. The vast majority died of
    asphyxiation, crushed to death by the weight of hundreds of bodies
    pressing them against unyielding steel fences or the concrete steps of
    the terracing.

    Yet despite 23 years of investigations, reports and analysis, the most
    blindingly obvious fact is never spoken. The pressure that caused that
    crush didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t an act of God, it wasn’t a
    freak gravity storm. It came from behind them, and every ounce of it
    came from human beings. Specifically, it came from Liverpool fans.

    Almost every organisation or group involved at Hillsborough made a
    contribution to the deadly events that played out on that day. The FA
    inexplicably allocated the Leppings Lane end to the Liverpool fans,
    giving the far larger Kop stand at the opposite side to the
    less-numerous supporters of Nottingham Forest, despite the Leppings Lane
    end having suffered repeatedly from overcrowding issues in previous
    years.

    (See chapter 1, pages 6-7, of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report for details.)

    Sheffield Wednesday FC, despite making some modifications in the wake
    of previous events, had failed to take any effective action with regard
    to either the West terracing’s capacity or logistics which would have
    avoided such issues. That lack of action was compounded on the day by
    inadequate policing and stewarding which failed to note the dangerous
    situation developing in the central pen and divert fans away to the side
    pens where there was more room.

    A police commander with no experience in similar events was paralysed
    by indecision at vital moments. Officers on the pitch failed to grasp
    the gravity of the situation until it was too late, believing it to be a
    public-order issue rather than a public-safety one. As the disaster
    unfolded, ambulances which could have saved many of the victims were
    prevented by the police from coming to their aid for the same reason.
    Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar saw what was happening and pointed
    it out, but initially played on rather than bringing the game to a stop.

    But none of these failings caused a single death.
    Neither the FA, Sheffield Wednesday, the police commanders, the officers
    on duty, the players on the pitch or the ambulance crews exerted the
    fatal pressure on the back of the crowd, which built and built until
    crash barriers gave way and the mass of bodies in the central pen forced
    the air from the lungs of the unfortunate people at the front. The only
    people who exerted that force were Liverpool supporters.

    I’ve been in hundreds of crowds. At football matches, at gigs, at
    Edinburgh’s early Hogmanay celebrations where half a million crammed
    onto a few streets of the city (before the overcrowding led to tight
    ticketing controls) and at the infamous first Future Entertainment Show
    at Earls Court, where queues to get in wrapped all the way round the
    vast arena and I’m still amazed that nobody was seriously injured in a
    narrow tunnel between two areas of the exhibition.

    The most frightening were the rock concerts, mostly at Glasgow
    Barrowlands. In the days of terracing in football stadia I always headed
    for the back of the ground anyway because I preferred a higher
    viewpoint, though partly also out of fear of crushes. But Barrowlands –
    which holds roughly the same amount of people as the Leppings Lane pens –
    was scary. The excited throng would edge forwards looking for a better
    viewing-point, and if you’d made the mistake of heading for the moshpit
    you could find yourself pressed alarmingly tightly against the
    chest-high barriers between the floor and stage.

    For most bands the crowds were calm enough and the squeeze never
    menacing, but on “special” occasions, like the Pogues’ Christmas-Eve
    show with Joe Strummer, things could get rowdy. Before the band had even
    taken the stage that night the pressure at the front was intense, and
    as a not-very-tall figure with a slight eight-stone frame I was clearly
    going to be in trouble if anything went wrong.

    So I started jabbing my elbows and heels behind me, and worked my way
    back through the crowd to a safer spot near the sides. People swear and
    bat at you angrily, but you get there, partly because their natural
    reaction to your jabbing is to leap backwards and that ripples through
    the people behind them until there’s enough space to wriggle through. I
    watched the show in safety and sturdier people than I filled the space
    at the front, and everyone had a super time.

    Now before anyone starts shouting, let’s be clear about something. For the people at the front of Leppings Lane, it was far too late for that.
    By the time the magnitude of their predicament became clear, there
    wasn’t a hope of them being able to move. So let’s wind the timeline
    back a few minutes.

    While the central pen was already dangerously full, the tipping point
    was the introduction of hundreds more fans when the police opened an
    exit gate to let more people into the ground, in fear (ironically) that
    the chaotic scenes at the inadequate number of turnstiles were going to
    lead to deaths from crushing. And it’s in the space between the
    turnstiles and the terraces that the disaster really happened.

    The area between the opened Gate C, directly below the tunnel through
    the West Stand on the above diagram, and the tunnel itself (which leads
    to the central pen) is a large space – more than sufficient to safely
    relieve the pressure on the turnstiles. The problem arose at the
    bottleneck of the tunnel entrance, and that was the place where
    Liverpool supporters sealed the fate of their comrades.

    I don’t know about you, readers, but if I walk into the Post Office or
    the cinema and there’s a queue, what I tend to do is walk up to the
    person at the end of the queue and then stop, rather than charging
    bodily into them in an attempt to make the queue move faster. As a rule,
    I assume there’s a reason nobody’s moving, and that whatever it is
    isn’t going to be helped by me ramming it. It doesn’t seem like rocket
    science.

    But for some reason, once a crowd reaches a certain size people seem to
    assume that the normal rules of civilised behaviour they observe
    elsewhere in life no longer apply. Responsibility for individual action
    is abdicated to the mob – a notoriously stupid, reckless and dangerous
    entity. Whenever you attempt to engage in debate about Hillsborough, the
    argument always comes down to the fact that apparently there’s nothing
    you can do about the fact that there will be pushing, and that it’s
    entirely the responsibility of the police to deal with the consequences.

    But there is no such thing as a hive mind. Everyone in a crowd who is
    pushing into a solid wall of bodies in front of them, exerting pressure
    in the full rational knowledge that there’s a reason it isn’t moving, is
    an individual human being with a brain of their own. At Hillsborough,
    everyone pushing their way into the tunnel knew perfectly well that it
    opened into an enclosed area with no exits, hemmed in by overhanging
    steel fences, which minutes before kick-off was likely to already be
    crammed with people, and which took the inherently-hazardous form of a stairway.

    But they pushed anyway, in the apparent belief that the laws of physics
    didn’t apply to football grounds and they could magically create space
    from nowhere if only they pushed hard enough. And space was indeed
    created, from the only place it possibly could be – the rib cages of the
    people already on the terracing.

    This simple, empirical law of nature is the great unspeakable truth
    about Hillsborough, the only contributing factor to the tragedy that can
    never be spoken aloud despite being the most important one. It’s true
    that if the FA had allocated the Kop end to Liverpool, the disaster
    probably wouldn’t have happened. It’s true that if stewards had been in
    place behind Gate C directing fans to the emptier side pens, the
    disaster probably wouldn’t have happened. It’s true that if officers on
    the pitch had realised what was happening sooner and opened the fences,
    the disaster probably wouldn’t have happened, or at least would have
    been greatly reduced. It’s true that if ambulances hadn’t been blocked
    from entering the stadium, dozens of lives might have been saved.

    But none of those things were the cause of death of
    the 96 victims. They died from the application of physical force behind
    them, and no matter how much you try to skirt around the issue, the
    ultimately inescapable fact is that every last ounce of that pressure
    came from Liverpool fans. The unending, maudlin obsession of the club’s
    fans with Hillsborough for the last 23 years has its root not in anger,
    but in guilt.

    None of this is to say that the campaign which eventually led to the
    Hillsborough Independent Panel report wasn’t necessary. The police
    cover-up which followed the disaster is beyond a shadow of a doubt one
    of the most appalling, shameful disgraces of British history. There’s no
    shortage of coverage of that, though, so we’ll leave the rest of the
    world to discuss and digest it with the horror it fully merits.

    The true crime of the police is that their despicable,
    scarcely-believable attempts to disguise their own calamitous failings
    have allowed attention to be diverted away from those who actually
    slaughtered the poor doomed souls at the front of the Leppings Lane
    central pen – the irresponsible, reckless cretins who pushed into a
    solid wall of bodies even as agonised screams cut the air in front of
    them.

    (And indeed, whose actions helped create the circumstances which caused
    the victims to be trapped in the first place. Hillsborough could have
    happened at almost any ground in the country in the late 1980s, but
    Liverpool’s fans must shoulder a disproportionate share of the blame for
    the existence of the fateful fences, which in part arose from their
    murderous actions at Heysel Stadium four years earlier.)

    The police’s mendacious attempts to blame the fans for being drunk,
    late or ticketless were red herrings. The reality is much simpler, and
    required no lying – the fans were to blame because they, alone, were the
    ones who pushed and thereby caused the crush.

    No matter how many vindictive, pointless prosecutions
    – of people who ultimately found themselves placed in a position with
    which they were unable to cope, and will have to live with the
    consequences of their failures forever – may eventually result from the
    HIP report, those who directly caused the deaths will never
    face a court or a jury of their peers, and indeed will be allowed to
    piously assert their moral outrage at those who were merely unable to
    rescue the innocent from their lethal stupidity.

    Until they do, and until the individuals who make up every crowd take
    responsibility for their own actions, there will be no justice for the
    96.

    At least have the balls to admit that he said this just two years ago.

    ~alec

  3. Alec

    You’re Comical Ali! Oh, nothing to see here, none of Stewpot’s words could possibly be construed as blaming the 96 for the events, except when he says “The reality is much simpler, and required no lying – the fans were to
    blame because they, alone, were the ones who pushed and thereby caused
    the crush” and calls prosecutions against the lying liars of the Police “vindictive”.

    ~alec

  4. Charles Addison

    And by your logic the No vote isn’t about democracy either; just a different form of nationalism!

  5. Jeanne Tomlin

    Easy enough for people to go to his blog and see exactly what he says. No need to take your word for it or mine for that matter.

    http://wingsoverscotland.com/

    Judging for oneself is always a good thing.

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