Britain has its own sort of corporate, right wing media. In the UK it's newspapers that tend to be partisan, and broadcasters who tend to be a little more balanced. We often have the opposite here, and unfortunately, our sensationalist tendency is hurting UK broadcasting. But that's another story.
So considering how awful the British Press are, I thought it would be fun to describe the SNP using the ruthlessly anti-SNP press. Follow me across the jump, and let's get imbalanced!
The SNP are Stalinists: The Daily Mail
From the daily mail.
The smell of blood is in the Scottish air – and the nationalist daggers are out once again...if the SNP performs as the polls suggest, an overall Labour majority in May will be almost impossible. But a Labour-SNP coalition becomes an increasingly likely scenario – and a worrying one. Because the SNP could influence the whole of the UK with what has become a divisive brand of state socialism.
One is a plan to give rural communities the right of compulsory purchase over the land they farm – even if the landowner, whose family may have been custodians of it for generations, doesn’t want to sell it.
The SNP also want to change the inheritance laws of primogeniture that would fragment the ownership of the great estates within a few generations by ensuring the division of property among all of a landowner’s children. Then there is the removal of the tax breaks that make many estates viable and investment in them possible.
I love the Daily Mail. They're so over-the-top that they're impossible to take seriously.
So here's the situation. Half of Scottish land is owned by just 432 people according to the UK government (PDF). These people are usually fantastically wealthy. They have massive hunting estates where they charge rich people from all over the world tens of thousands of pounds a visit to come and hunt and fish. Sometimes these extremely luxurious castle stays cost thousands of pounds a night.
Currently, the super rich pay no taxes on this economic activity. The SNP wants to change that.
The other two land reforms include ending primogeniture and providing local councils with the right of eminent domain, so that these wealthy landowners can't squeeze the public treasury when a small town needs to build a school or a road.
But I guess the US is Stalinist according to the Daily Mail, since we don't have mandated primogeniture, tax business operations in luxury hotels, and have already provided our governments with eminent domain.
Welcome to the Peoples Republic of America, Comrades! I bet none of you knew you were living in a glorious workers republic instead of the most ruthlessly capitalist nation on earth!
Why land reform was necessary.
I think of the story of Andrew Riddell whenever I think of the Highlands. In the Highlands of Scotland we have the last gasps of feudalism, where just 432 people own half of the land in Scotland. Andrew Riddell was one of the victims of this system. He was a tenant farmer, a sharecropper, farming the land that his family had worked on for over a century. He lived on the land bought in 1998 by Alastair Salvesen, Scotland's third richest man. When Salvesen attempted to remove Riddell, Riddell sought legal help, and won the right to stay under laws designed to protect tenant farmers. But Salvesen didn't give up. He hounded Riddell for a decade, spent absurd amounts of money on lawyers, took the case to the court of session, and won.
After Riddell brought in his final crop before he would be pushed off his land, he shot himself in the head. Stories like these are what led the SNP to introduce sweeping land reforms designed to end this system of power and privilege. Scottish Law is designed to protect tenant farmers from abuses like legal harassment that led to Riddell's suicide, but because these laws are often ignored, reforms are needed.
Riddell's case isn't the first time that laws designed to protect the people of Scotland from wealthy landowners have been ignored or overturned.
But enough with the Daily Mail, on to the Torygraph!
The SNP are National Socialists (lawl): The Telegraph
Indeed, there might seem to be so little distinction between Labour and the Nats that they could easily join forces. As no one else is using the label at the moment, why not call themselves National Socialists? But there is one important difference, which was implicit in Gordon Brown’s campaigning rhetoric. He would like the Scots to exploit more devolved powers to create socialism in Scotland, while staying in the Union so that Scots MPs could also vote to impose socialism on England.
There is only one way to deal with all this and bring Scotland to its senses. The English have to show some backbone. At present, it is assumed that as soon as the Scots make a demand for additional powers – devo max – England is obliged to capitulate. That is nonsense. As long as Scotland is part of the Union, the English are entitled to prevent the Scottish government from implementing crazy policies – because otherwise, England will have to pay the bills.
If the Scots wanted to reduce corporation tax and income tax, financing this by cuts in welfare spending on the able-bodied, while also adopting educational reforms that would make Michael Gove look timid, a devolved Scotland could aspire to the intellectual leadership of Europe, as during the Scottish Enlightenment. None of that is on the agenda. Instead, we would have a high-tax, high-welfare Scotland in which the teachers’ unions ran education.
Okay, so the Scots are "National Socialists" if they put Miliband in power, because they want to raise taxes on the 1%, build public services, and support teachers' unions. Oh, and they're subsidized by England. You know, let me put all this stupid talk of subsidies to bed.
In a long and rambling post by the BBC, the broadcaster comes to the conclusion that nobody actually subsidizes anybody else in the UK. Instead everyone's equally swiping the credit card:
On the Treasury view, the gap between spending and revenues in Scotland for 2009-10 was £3,150 per head. On the Scottish Nationalist view, the gap between spending and revenues was closer to £2,130.
Please, take your pick. All I ask is you bear in mind one other number - related to one other obvious, but very important fact. Namely, that Scotland is not the only part of the UK that is currently spending more than it raises in revenues.
If you apply the same kind calculation to the UK as a whole, the net 'subsidy' for the average person was well over £2,000 last year.
So Scotland and England do have that in common, after all.
All this furor swirls around questions of economics that literally no one has the answers to. The British Government has intentionally made it impossible to know any official figures about how much of the north sea oil fund is Scottish, because they've refused to ever produce any figures at all on the topic. In the 1970s, when oil was first discovered, it was decided that the Scots shouldn't be allowed to know how much oil was actually of the coast of Scotland. This was because of a very real threat from the growing Scottish National Party. So they decided that they'd stop counting oil money as part of the Scottish budget, and consider it "extraterritorial." This was what made the whole campaign last year so contentious. Nobody knows how much money the Scots actually make on their oil. Every figure is a guess. And the honest truth is that it doesn't matter.
The Argument that the Scottish economy isn't doing so well and that Scotland has some very deep problems is not in any way an argument in favor of the union. And yet for some reason, it was treated as one. But enough referendum talk.
Scotland wants to take control of its own income taxes. Currently, if it raises or lowers taxes it has to do so equally over all tax brackets. The SNP actually tried to change the Scottish tax code in 2007, to get rid of a flat-tax called the council tax, and replace it with a graduated local income tax that would shift the burden of local expenses off of the backs of the poor.
The Labour government blocked the policy by threatening to cut the Scottish budget. When the SNP has tried to make it's taxation situation more left leaning, they've been stopped. If they tried again with the current government, they'd be stopped again.
The hope is that when they hold the balance of power, they'll be able to institute some genuinely progressive policies. So that's the Torygraph's take.
How about some balance from Guardian columnist George Monibot?
It’s no coincidence that the two most regressive forms of taxation in the UK – council tax banding and the payment of farm subsidies – both favour major owners of property. The capping of council tax bands ensures that the owners of £100 million flats in London pay less than the owners of £200,000 houses in Blackburn(8,9). Farm subsidies, which remain limitless as a result of the Westminster government’s lobbying(10), ensure that every household in Britain hands £245 a year to the richest people in the land(11). The single farm payment system – under which landowners are paid by the hectare – is a reinstatement of a mediaeval levy called feudal aid(12): a tax the vassals had to pay to their lords.
If this is the government of enterprise, not rent, ask yourself why capital gains tax (at 28%) is lower than the top rate of income tax. Ask yourself why principal residences, though their value may rise by millions, are altogether exempt(13). Ask yourself why rural landowners are typically excused capital gains tax, inheritance tax and the first five years of income tax(14). The enterprise society? It’s a con, designed to create an illusion of social mobility.
The Scottish programme for government(15) is the first serious attempt to address the nature of landholding in Britain since David Lloyd George’s budget of 1909. Some of its aims hardly sound radical until you understand the context. For example it will seek to discover who owns the land. Big deal. Yes, in fact, it is. At the moment the owners of only 26% of the land in Scotland have been identified(16).
The government taking these steps was an SNP Majority government. These progressive actions are why their leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is the most popular politician in the UK.
The SNP are set to take a raft of seats tomorrow. From every angle, they look to be one of the most progressive things to happen in Britain for decades. That's why the right-wing, corporate press are screaming so loud. Their rich owners look set to actually have to pay their fair share for once.
And the real reason that the SNP will take a ton of seats is that Labour is still way to far to the right to inspire the kind of support they used to.
Historically a left wing party, they've been tacking rightward in recent years, and on economics, they're firmly to the Right of even our Democratic party. They've promised to be tougher on welfare recipients than the Tories, and they've promised to put greater controls on immigration when the British system is already splitting families apart, and telling Britons that their marriages are arrangements of convenience.
They have adopted conservative rhetoric because it worked for Blair in 1997, and they haven't figured out how to do anything other than be Tory-Lite.
If they'd just moved back to the left, and fought for their historic left-wing ideals, they would be wiping the floor with an unpopular, right-wing government.
You can't beat conservatives by agreeing with them. Especially not when the entire premise of their austerity argument is "The Labour Party broke the country, and now we have to do tough and painful things to fix it." By agreeing with Austerity, Labour is essentially saying "Yes, we did break the country, horribly, but we've learned our lesson, and we won't do that again. Instead, we'll do even more painful and tough things to fix the economy than the Tories will."
That, dear reader, is why they're not taking a majority tomorrow. Thankfully, the conservatives don't look likely to take one either.
What happens tomorrow will be interesting.
I'll be here with my own live blog, covering the results as they come in in Scotland.
For my previous diaries on the current UK election check out:
Scotland Rising: If you think the Republican wave in 2010 was big...
For why Labour is Losing, see this post.
For the SNP's likely strategy post election, see yesterday's post.
And for a longer conversation on the subject, you can check out The Coffee Cast podcast here.
1:16 PM PT: As Tardis10 pointed out, I forgot probably the biggest Scandal in UK political history.
Doll gate.
The accusation that Nicola Sturgeon is an awful ruthless person because, as a child, she cut the hair off her sister's doll:
I'm already at the fair use limit so I'll just have to link the article.
You can't make this stuff up folks. Well, you can, but you have to get a job with the British tabloids first.