Abstract
After a landslide victory for the nationalists, Scotland needs a questioning press again
Reeling. That is the only word to describe Scotland in the aftermath of the general election. As I write this, three days after the greatest landslide victory in the history of Scottish politics, I still find it hard to come to terms with the enormity of it all. A country that has, for as long as most of us remember, been a Labour fiefdom, is now solid SNP territory, from Caithness to Cambeltown, from Aberdeen to Ardnamurchan, from … well, you get the point. Of the 59 Scottish MPs who will enter the House of Commons in a couple of weeks’ time, 56 are SNP. Labour has been reduced from 41 seats to one. There is a single Liberal Democrat in Orkney and Shetland, and a lone Tory at the other end in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale. Just three non-nationalist MPs. The word tsunami became the biggest cliché of election night, as commentators scrabbled for hyperbole. I felt as if I was clinging to a palm tree.
For me the seminal moment came at 2.50am precisely on Friday, when Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, the seat once held by Gordon Brown with a rock-solid majority of 23,000, fell to the SNP with a majority close to 10,000 – a 34 per cent swing, one of those huge shifts that normally only take place in byelections. By then, however, such was the momentous nature of events, that the pundits could only shrug their shoulders and move on to the next cataclysm. Like Macbeth on the battlements, hearing that his queen was dead, this was just another item in a catalogue of awful news: “She should have died hereafter,” he mumbles. “There would have been a time for such a word.” I know how he felt.
Now, of course, it is a case of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And no one is any more certain of how that will play than the pollsters were in constructing some of the worst predictions I can remember. There is an upside to this, however. Just possibly, in this atmosphere of uncertainty and speculation, newspapers may recover their position as the best sources of reliable information, analysis and commentary. The next 12 months, in the run-up to the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections, will be a critical test of their ability to rise to the test. If Scotland has, in effect, become a one-party state, then the ability of the press to stand up to the government of the day, question its assumptions, challenge its propaganda and offer robust investigation and opinion will be vital. How well set up is it to perform that task?
In the past, one would have run a slide rule over the existing print media and reached a rough and ready – and probably highly opinionated – conclusion as to which was doing the best job. That is harder to do these days because so much news and comment is filtered through social media. To ignore the daily agenda on Twitter, Facebook or any of the transitory blogs that feed on daily news and unleash a torrent of frequently abusive comment, is to ignore the reality of how most people, particularly the young, receive their information. Watching the election on television was to be constantly distracted by the line running across the bottom of the screen, which picked up on some of the Twitter conversations. They were often first with the news. The fact that Ed Balls might lose his seat in Morley and Outwood was tweeted long before the broadcasters picked up on it.
Social media became part of the story during the election because political candidates, too, resorted to online commentary, some of which backfired. The famous “cybernats” – nationalists posting personal and abusive comments about their rivals – were criticised by everyone, including the SNP, but were never reined in by the party leadership.
Luckily, some of them had their comeuppance. The only Labour MP to retain his seat – in Edinburgh South – did so because his SNP rival had resorted to such vile messages that the good folk of Morningside felt unable to stomach him. On the other hand, the youngest MP to have been elected in Britain since 1667, 20-year-old Mhairi Black, who defeated the shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander in Paisley and Renfrewshire South, may actually have gained from some of her teenage indiscretions – Twitter messages, whose language is so indelicate that I will forebear from inflicting them on the sensitive readers of this journal. Suffice to say that accounts of heavy drinking nights, caustic comments on Celtic supporters and violence threatened towards the nether region of Labour councillors were liberally seasoned with the F-word. She won by a majority of 6,000, a swing of more than 30 per cent. Quite what her impact will be in the Commons remains to be seen.
Online coverage needs good reporters
Faced with this alternative source, Scottish newspapers – as elsewhere in the United Kingdom – have put much of their own resources into online coverage. But they still need good reporters and expert commentators to hold their own. And since the indigenous national press – Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record – faced with falling circulations have all had to cut back on staff and resources, they have been doing so with one hand tied behind their back. Given that, they did a decent enough job. Remembering the days when I edited The Scotsman with a staff of 80 or more, I am amazed at how the same paper today, with a skeleton team of barely a quarter of that, can still produce a respectable publication that remains essential reading in Edinburgh boardrooms. Its sale is down to 26,300 (ABC figures show a drop of 11 per cent on last year, so it is still in decline) but it manages to produce a dozen pages of news and enough commentary to make it a worthwhile purchase. However, both it and The Herald in Glasgow (37,000, down 5 per cent) lack the ability to mount any kind of serious, in-depth reporting of the kind that would once have been seen as an essential counterblast to government propaganda. The election, fought out in their pages, was a daily diet of political arm-wrestling between the rival parties, with little independent analysis by the papers themselves, which relied instead on commentary from academics or the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
It remains the case that the Scottish newspapers that are strongest in terms of circulation are the two regional papers of the north and east. The Press and Journal, Scotland's oldest newspaper founded in 1747, is published from Aberdeen and owned by the Dundee-based DC Thomson, publisher of the Beano. It covers the Highlands with several targeted editions and sells around 60,000 copies daily. The Courier in Dundee, also DC Thomson, sells some 47,000. Both recorded small losses of circulation in the latest results, but hold their own in a way no English regional can match.
What the election – and the referendum on independence that preceded it – has done is to interest London in Scottish affairs for the first time in a decade. When devolution first came in, 15 years ago, Scotland was effectively consigned to the outer reaches of metropolitan media interest, resulting in a north-south divide in the way national newspapers covered the country. Scottish editions of papers like The Times and The Telegraph carried Scottish news and opinion, but these were usually dropped in English editions. As the referendum crept up on us, however, deciding the future state of the United Kingdom interested even London newsdesks. Political correspondents migrated north, to report on a nation with which they had lost touch.
That interest was revived as opinion polls began to report an SNP surge, suggesting that independence might get back onto the agenda, despite its 55 per cent:45 per cent defeat in last September's referendum. Both The Telegraph and The Times boosted their Scottish editions. The Guardian, which has deliberately not established a separate edition for Scotland, choosing to judge news on its own merits, sent correspondents north to try and understand what was happening across Hadrian's Wall.
The ABC figures for the latter half of 2014 (the latest available) are revealing. Against the backdrop of a gloomy and continuing decline, with average falls of around 10 per cent, The Times, which has shored up its reporting team and expanded its Scottish coverage, was the only national newspaper to record an increase in Scotland – a modest 1 per cent, but significant in the context of decline elsewhere.
That, however, paled in comparison with the figures recorded by the Sunday Herald, the only established newspaper in Scotland to come out for the nationalist cause and urge its readers to vote yes in the referendum. A publication written off at one stage by its critics as a token adjunct to its sister paper, The Herald, it recorded, at the height of the referendum campaign, a 111 per cent increase – a remarkable increase, albeit from a fairly low base. Averaged out by the ABC figures, released in February, it still showed 35 per cent growth to 32,200, only 5,000 short of the daily paper, which opted for no, and ahead of Scotland on Sunday, sister paper of The Scotsman, which is currently selling 27,500.
Buoyed by these results, Newsquest, the UK arm of the US-based Gannett group, which owns the Herald group, launched an avowedly nationalist newspaper called, originally enough, The National – the first paper deliberately established to support the SNP. The tabloid, which runs with the banner, “The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland”, was launched as a trial to test the appetite for a pro-independence daily title. It sold out its initial print run of 60,000 copies, priced at 50p, as well as attracting 11,000 digital edition subscribers who paid £1.50 for the first week's issues. Run on a skeleton staff of Herald journalists, it has subsequently settled down at a sale of about 20,000.
Whether, of course, it can hold on to its readers as Scottish politics begin to revert to normal – will that ever happen? – is another matter. The fact is that for anyone not entirely signed up to the SNP cult it is a dull read, as all one-issue papers are – full of predictable comment and lengthy articles by the party leader. The edition that came out on the Saturday after the election had as its front-page headline, “Look out, London – Sturgeon heads south after historic landslide”. Inside, all its 32 pages were devoted to politics. Not surprising perhaps, but if it is to survive it will, sooner or later, have to become a real newspaper rather than just a propaganda sheet.
Basking in The Sun
Meanwhile, The Sun, whose Scottish edition came out in support of the SNP and and southern edition backed Cameron, can bask in the achievement of having supported the winning side north and south of the border. With a circulation of 235,000, it still enjoys a healthy lead over the Labour-supporting Daily Record (197,900), and will doubtless do well as Scotland basks in the afterglow of an SNP-dominated election.
Scotland has, therefore, become something of a test-bed for media specialists. Will a country swept by nationalist euphoria encourage unquestioning journalism that simply echoes the prevailing political climate? Or will readers, sated by one-dimensional reporting, turn to those newspapers that challenge the status quo and have the resources and ability to unearth uncomfortable truths? That, after all, is what journalism should be all about.
Knowing the political correspondents of the Scottish press, an individualistic and cantankerous lot, I doubt if they will lie down and let Sturgeon and her ministers trample all over them. But they, as well as the country as a whole, will be judged on how they react to political developments over the months to come.
Let us hope that both find their own voice in this strange and unpredictable new climate. The reputation of good journalism is at stake.