As any moderately heavy internet user will tell you, it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have literally hundreds of browser tabs open at any one time.
Every now and again you’ll go to clean them up and find something that you’ve been meaning to write about in a quiet moment, and this certainly counts as a quiet moment in Scottish politics, so let’s do it now.
Because the story above is from March, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone anywhere talk about just how weird it is, or what it tells us about the 2024 SNP.
I’ve also believed in independence for as long as I can remember, and certainly since I was a small child. In May 2011, when Alex Salmond won an unprecedented (and never-repeated) absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament, I was noodling away as a freelance videogames journalist, writing features about retro games for magazines and for my personal blog Wings Over Sealand.
(Super-alert readers may have recently spotted that I’ve been importing some of those old pieces into Wings, as part of a general tidying-up of my internet presence and for something to do over the slow and rainy summer.)
But within just a few months, as an independence referendum became a reality, I’d all but given up writing about games and was focusing all my attention on this site as my contribution to the Yes campaign, because obviously some things matter more than others and the chance to restore Scotland’s nationhood only comes along – at the time of writing – once every 317 years.
And of course, I was (and still am) just some idiot. I had a couple of thousand Twitter followers and no reach to speak of. My personal blog had a readership counted in the hundreds, on a good day, and maybe 10% of them at the very most had any interest in Scottish politics.
But still, I wanted to try to do my bit for the cause I’d believed in all my life, however small that bit might be, so I got to work.
Murray Foote, who occupied a position of infinitely greater influence as the deputy editor of Scotland’s biggest tabloid newspaper, with over 300,000 copies sold a day at the time (he later became editor in February 2014, seven crucial months before the referendum) took a different view, however.
Rather than deploy his privileged and powerful influence in the service of the cause he professed to have always believed in – a perfectly legitimate thing for a newspaper editor to do, having no duty of impartiality, unlike broadcasters such as the BBC – the Record took a stance that it claimed was neutral, but which everyone else interpreted as Unionist, in line with the Labour Party the paper has backed for its entire existence.
Most infamously, it was under Foote’s editorship that the paper instigated “The Vow”, which by Foote’s own admission sought to deflect voters away from independence and to securing the “devo max” option that he claimed to believe most people wanted.
In the June 2018 Times column where he made that admission, Foote also strongly implied that Brexit had driven him to reluctantly CHANGE his position to supporting independence, even though his current claim is that he’d actually supported it all the time. Nicola Sturgeon herself noted that he “now” supported independence.
(He even put out a video saying that while he’d previously been “sympathetic” to the cause of independence – something he hid REMARKABLY well during his editorship of the Record – he’d “never considered it the universal cure for all social ills”, but that “events change and shape opinion”, again pointing to a switch of view, something supported by all the media reporting at the time.)
Talking to the Herald in 2020, Foote even went so far as to suggest that he’d basically had no option but to produce “The Vow”, out of duty to Record readers.
But that’s not what a newspaper editor’s job is, on any level. In an idealistic world, it’s to bring them the truth, filtered through a prism of what the editor believes, and Foote tells us that he believed independence was the best thing for Scotland, yet guided his readers away from it.
In a more pragmatic world an editor’s job is simply to try to sell more papers, and in 2014 there was a huge gaping open goal for any Scottish newspaper to appeal to almost half of the population which supported a Yes vote but didn’t have a single paper reflecting their view.
But instead of trying to appeal to what would end up being 1.6m voters absolutely crying out for a voice on the newsstands, and despite the fact that even a substantial chunk of the traditional Labour voters who make up the Record’s audience backed indy, Foote doggedly stuck to “neutrality” even as the paper’s sales plunged.
Now, that fall wasn’t because the Record didn’t support independence. As the graph shows, it was part of a long-term trend and one that affected and continues to affect all printed news media. But Foote had the opportunity to, at the very minimum, try a cynical “Hail Mary” tactic that could have paid off handsomely.
The Sunday Herald more than doubled its sales by backing independence. The National, a dreadful newspaper from the off, leapt from a standing start to 50,000 sales when it launched shortly after the referendum – testament to the fact that there was a pent-up audience out there just waiting for a pro-indy daily, however terrible.
The Record now sells fewer than 50K, a drop of almost 80% from the 224,000 it was shifting when Foote took over in 2014. It’s certainly hard to see how the Record coming out for indy could have made things worse.
So Murray Foote followed neither his conscience, nor any journalistic principles, nor even the money. Instead, the self-professed independence supporter turned round in front of the open goal and hoofed the ball back towards his own keeper.
The Record wasn’t neutral. It launched countless venomous attacks on Yes voices, including this site, and it worked with the three Unionist party leaders on a plan intended to secure a No vote. Foote himself admitted in 2015 that it had been “on balance, pro-Union”.
Yet he also claimed that “we never wanted The Vow to sway the outcome of the vote”, which is an obvious nonsense. And again, we hear that from Foote’s own mouth, because in the same article he admits the famous Yes 51% poll was the catalyst for the initiative.
If you believe in independence and it takes the lead in a shock poll two weeks before the vote, you don’t have to do a thing. You don’t have to take a risky stance that might lose you readers. If the Unionist leaders are in total disarray, you just don’t ride to their rescue and help them come up with a “coherent strategy” for a No vote. One does not, famously, interrupt one’s opponents while they’re making a mistake.
You sit innocently on your hands, let the chips fall where they may, and trust the Scottish people to decide. You don’t get the baddies to pull themselves together and write a better manifesto at the exact moment they’re reeling and wobbling.
(Whether “The Vow” had any material impact is a matter of conjecture and opinion, but it certainly tried to. Why on Earth would Cameron, Miliband and Clegg have done it otherwise? THEY weren’t claiming to be neutral.)
So quite why the SNP felt he was suitable first to take over as their comms chief, and then their CEO, is a mystery that defies rational explanation. This is a man – a “wily old fox”, in the coded words of his media colleagues – whose word simply cannot be trusted on the matter of independence, supposedly the party’s defining aim. He can’t even get his own story straight. Did he always support it or did Brexit change his mind? Was the Record neutral or “pro-Union”? Which Murray Foote should we believe?
And anyone who thinks that THAT guy is going to lead the SNP or the Yes movement to the promised land probably needs their bumps feeling.
