A Response To A Podcast

The second most popular Unionist blogger Kevin Hague has featured on a Matt Forde podcast . He made a lot of questionable statements.

‘Comedian, Broadcaster (and former political adviser) Matt Forde presents The Political Party, the show where renowned politicians and experts open up and give their most honest, revealing and often hilarious answers.’ – Matt’s blurb

A whole podcast devoted to the, presumably, ‘expert’ Kev Hague turning his twitter feed into the spoken word. An invite which could’ve led anywhere he wanted turned into just another day of arguing steadfastly against independence and against those who are for independence, all safely anchored to his obsession – GERS.

‘Expert’

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…Or chancer?

Not that he had to argue particularly hard at any point in this lazy anodyne conversation with the comedian and fellow twitter based arguer for the Union. They agreed the hell out of each other.

Twitter Unionists, like Matt, know Kevin is not an economist (he’s a business owner who tweets and blogs about independence and the SNP, who updates a graph every August on the release of a public finances report) and spends the next 12 months misrepresenting it at people. But they absolutely don’t let small details like that stop them from treating him like one.

His analysis, Rangers badge twitter accounts routinely claim, shows us – mathematically, scientifically – that Scotland does well out of the Union. End of. The numbers don’t lie. Just don’t subject them to international comparison whatever you do. Kev doesn’t, as it’s the only way he can claim Scotland receives high (generous) public spending in the Union.

The faith shown in him and his painfully blinkered attempts at argument by omission by some Unionists online is a genuine spectacle.

But it is a tiny, tiny, twitter bubble of obsessives and you do wonder if Matt’s bigger, wider, audience of UK centrists found it all a bit agrarian. And you have to question the fit here – given ‘Political Party’ is meant to be funny – ‘often hilarious’.

Sure, they’ve been exchanging chummy tweets for years now and Matt obviously values Kevin’s work and wants to reward him with the status of expert. But why on earth did he expect a revealing conversation interesting enough to record for an audience?

What in Kevin’s feed hinted at an engaging sense of humour? A wit that’d appeal to people who aren’t bothered in the slightest about what someone from the Fraser of Allander Institute said last week.

A few more guests like this, Matt and your party will be dragging, terminally.

Anyway, to what Kev said…

The blogger (who seems to base his argumentative arrogant persona and mo on being a kind of opposite spectrum derivative of his old adversary (now fellow anti SNPer) – Wings Over Scotland – Stuart Campbell) again seemed to suggest that Growth Commission Chair, Andrew Wilson should feel somehow obliged to debate him because he’d tweeted and blogged about it. Implying that fear was the reason he didn’t.

In the interests of fairness, since there was nobody on Forde’s podcast to defend Wilson, here’s a few points in reply that hopefully explain why somebody might not want to debate Kev:

On the day of the Growth Commission’s release Hague was on BBC Scotland radio, apparently ready and wiling to present a knee jerk critique a report he hadn’t actually read yet. In the following few days he had blogged about (apparently ‘destroying’ (going by the retweets)) the 100k word, 354-page, 14-member panel, Paper and its 50 odd recommendations and had orchestrated a demented twitter pile-on demanding that Andrew Wilson converse with him. Also retweeting people accusing their target of being scared.
The Unionist blogger’s hasty analysis featured him playing around with the countries used in the report for international perspective and complaining about something said on a BBC Question Time episode by someone completely uninvolved in the report. He also accused the IFS of being “rather generous” in their own analysis of the Growth Commission report.

People who have seen Kevin’s insult ladened, invasive, angry, approach to these things weren’t surprised that Wilson didn’t take up the offer.

For context Kevin, (who is ‘not a Unionist’) is a big donor to Scotland in Union, has (genuinely) accused the SNP of using Neuro Linguistic Programming to literally brainwash voters – even referring to them as the ‘SNLP’.
He immediately accused a shady cabal of ‘cybernats’ of hacking his blog when it went down – claiming they were trying to silence him – it turned out to be a technical issue to do with broken links.
Suggested people support independence because they are anti-English and likened a pro-independence blogger to the Nazis’

Other highlights of the podcast spent talking entirely on the one subject include:

Hague accusing the SNP of using ‘loaded language’ (NLP again) yet talking himself about ‘breaking up the UK’ and ‘grievance’ and of ‘actively trying to piss off the English’ (citation needed).
Describing the term ‘power grab’ as ‘bullshit’ when, actually, there are quite a few good reasons it’s called a power grab. The SNP, Greens, Labour, Lib Dems, Welsh and Northern Irish parliaments all agreeing with that label. All the while ignoring the actual point.
Casually suggesting Tory governments Scotland didn’t vote for aren’t an issue because they’re ‘transient’. (Scotland has had the government it voted for 36% of the time since 1970 – to its obvious detriment). Not what transient means.
Kev claiming nobody serious has any concerns about GERS figures, ignoring the fact that nobody serious uses them the way he does.
And finally giving us a very odd anecdote about an unnamed SNP MP that, knowing Hague’s habit of wilfully misrepresenting the arguments of others, was highly dubious.

Kev accused the SNP of being the worst Party for ‘playing fast and loose with the truth’.