CALL me sceptical but experience teaches never to place reliance on stories based on quotes which are unattributed to any identifiable person. This doesn’t mean they are untrue. It just means they have no evidential base unless and until one emerges.
Readers of Sunday ‘heavies’ should exercise particular caution. Not a lot happens on Saturdays and there is pressure to come up with an “agenda-setting” front page which will be discussed on television with satisfactory levels of free publicity attached. All you need are compliant broadcasters with space to fill.
“According to reports” is a phrase to beware of. Certainly in the context of Scottish broadcasting, this normally means that a newspaper flyer which does not include a single named source is being relayed to the wider world without the tedious inconvenience of finding anything out – other than the indisputable fact that the story has appeared.
As the Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, put it so brilliantly in the 1960s, “the medium is the message” whereby the “content … blinds us to the character of the medium". McLuhan got that spot on decades before social media came along to further muddy the waters.
If anyone can be bothered, it will be interesting to find how the Sunday Times revelation that the incoming Truss government is plotting to “change the rules” around a referendum on independence stands the test of time. This intelligence was attributed to “a senior ally close to Liz Truss”.
Ah, “a senior ally”! This is another phrase to beware of, both words being prone to definitional flexibility. I remember my own experience of hearing that “number 10” thought this or that, when it was never clear if this meant the Prime Minister or Larry the Downing Street cat. Probably closer in rank to the latter than the former, I usually concluded.
If indeed “a senior ally close to Liz Truss” vouchsafed these thoughts under conditions of anonymity, then it must be concluded that he or she is a particularly stupid one. That is not a possibility which should be precluded. Given the calibre of she who is about to be anointed, it seems unlikely that her courtiers are the brightest and the best.
For example, the presence of Lord Frost in her inner circle sends out a yellow alert. The emergence of this middle-ranking diplomat as a power in the land provides one of life’s minor mysteries. His stint as director general of the Scotch Whisky Association was less than distinguished though he did argue strongly against the foolishness of Brexit. Oh, hang on…
His subsequent elevation and the job of booring for Britain to ensure the worst possible Brexit were attributed to a warm relationship with Boris Johnson when both were Brussels-based in the 1990s. Johnson was burnishing his reputation as an unprincipled figure who fabricated anti-EU stories for the delectation of Daily Telegraph readers. The two got on famously and now he reportedly (sorry) thinks he should be Foreign Secretary. That’s fine. Just keep him away from Scotland.
However, my own tendency is to assume until proven otherwise that the source of stories is best judged by the cause which benefits from them. In this case, it is difficult to imagine anyone “senior” believing the messages conveyed of muscular unionism and rule-bending were, at this juncture, serving the interests of Ms Truss.
There is also a plausibility element. According to The Times: “It is understood that the Tory leadership frontrunner Liz Truss is looking at plans to pass a new law that would bar another independence referendum until polls show 60 per cent of people in Scotland favour a new vote for at least a year”.
Certainly, it is a novel proposition for legislation to be based on opinion polling. Novel – and also unlikely. In fact, the only person I have heard talking about the “60 per cent for a year” precondition was Nicola Sturgeon who, in her early days as First Minister, was somewhat more realistic about when and whether the nation should be divided again.
Whatever the provenance of the Sunday Times story, there is no doubt about what followed. It was as if Ms Sturgeon was waiting in the Green Room for the call to camera and denunciation of the dastardly plot which a “senior ally of Liz Truss” had so obligingly revealed. And of course, there was nobody to challenge her because the offending quotes had been attributed to, well … nobody.
If by any chance, this nonsense did emanate from “a senior ally of Liz Truss”, let me offer a word of advice. The SNP have spent decades pretending Scotland is a victim, denied a constitutional separation that most of its population demands. That has never been true and when put to the test in 2014, the outcome confirmed this. The critical point is that those of us who do not want to create a separate state speak for the majority.
That is the democratic argument which should be reinforced and defended on the basis of courtesy, reason and argument, regardless of the endless clamour to the contrary. Any talk of creating barriers designed to frustrate the will of a potential – but non-existent – majority in the other direction is both undemocratic and entirely counter-productive.
Ms Sturgeon, who seems increasingly delusional about her own attributes, claims to have “seen off” three Tory Prime Ministers. What she means is that she has out-stayed them since it is the Tories alone who disposed of Cameron, May and Johnson.
As more thoughtful nationalists understand all too well, something of the reverse is true. Despite the comings and goings of Tory Prime Ministers, the dial has not moved one millimetre on Ms Sturgeon’s only political credo – independence. If her best hope of changing that rests on the stupidity of the next PM in line, it says little for how she has used the past 11 years.
Meanwhile, a “senior Tory MP” told me the other day: “The prospect of Liz Truss running the country terrifies me … absolutely terrifies me”. And that’s a genuine quote. Honest.
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