by Paul Kavanagh
WE’RE hearing a lot these days about the single market, and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it before the year’s end. The question that will dominate the coming months will be whether the UK should remain a part of the EU single market and customs union after it leaves the EU. It’s an issue that is likely to become almost as difficult to avoid as the royal wedding, although without the sycophancy and Nicholas Witchell so at least it should be marginally easier to tolerate.
It’s an invariable law of the British media that anything that is an issue in England becomes translated into a Scottish issue as well, and usually one which can be spun into a reason why Scotland couldn’t possibly cope as an independent country. The English NHS has spent the last few months in a state of near meltdown, so naturally the NHS in Scotland becomes subject to a succession of #SNPBad stories even though it’s performing considerably better than the Tory run NHS south of the border. If you believed the British nationalist media in Scotland, hundreds of thousands of Scots are waiting in A&E for as long as it takes the BBC to broadcast a story that’s positive about independence.
The BBC later admitted that it had got the figure for the number of patients waiting over 4 hours in A&E wildly wrong and had exaggerated it by a considerable amount. Being a responsible public service broadcaster the BBC made sure that the error, which was broadcast on the main news at six, was followed up by an apology and correction. Naturally in the interests of fairness, the BBC was concerned that the correction should receive a similar amount of publicity to the original error, so they wrote it on an A4 flyer in a 4 point font and nailed it to a telegraph pole halfway along the A896 in the wilds of Easter Ross. Sarah Smith, the BBC’s Scotland editor who had made the error, also corrected it on her Twitter account, which has fewer followers than an Orange Walk in Celtic Park. So that’s alright then.