Fix pencils... Scottish media's shock troops go over the top to defend Labour

THE Soviet Writers Union, of which only the Scottish chapter has survived the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is under pressure, like all the other old Stalinist institutions. The blind loyalty of Scottish media commentators to the Labour Party and its Holyrood satellite is an axiom. Recently, however, with Jack McFondle and his Lanarkshire warlords beset by controversy, the protective manoeuvrings of media loyalists are increasingly becoming part of the story.

Kevin Pringle, of the Scottish National Party’s executive, has complained to the BBC about coverage of the McFondle affair by Ruth Wishart on her Radio Scotland programme Eye to Eye - presumably so titled because it routinely sees eye-to-eye with the Labour establishment.

In denouncing the doyenne of consensual broadcasting, he has provoked a gasp in media loyalist circles comparable to the sensation created when Oliver Twist asked for more. La Wishart is not just the owner of the worst microphone voice this side of Ulan Bator; she is an icon of devo-deference and one of the Vestal Virgins who guard the sacred flame that is the mythical memory of Donald Three Millions.

She is also fastidious about objectivity in the media. When your humble servant made bold, during the referendum on devolution in 1997, to express certain criticisms in this column of the government’s conduct, La Wishart denounced the very existence of this still, small voice of dissent as "suggestive of slight impairment in the objectivity department".

It should be understood that La Wishart was using the term "objectivity" not in its obsolete, bourgeois-liberal sense, but in its devolved context, meaning unquestioning, unshakeable loyalty to Scottish Labour, in all circumstances. Fortunately, we now have objective broadcasting as the norm in Scotland. If you doubt that, look in at the BBC studios and see how many Tories you can flush out.

There is a stoic fortitude among the acolytes of the Left in Scottish broadcasting: no matter how ferociously the hard facts discredit their theses, they plough on undeterred. Typical was Lesley Riddoch’s crusade to persuade the whole nation that Maruma was the greatest thing to happen to the Isle of Eigg since Pleistocene times. Nice one, Lesley! How is the great conceptual artist these days? Do you still keep in touch?...

Most heroic of all was the defence of Henry McClich by Brian Taylor, the BBC’s political correspondent. The Last Watch of Pompeii had nothing on that inspiring example of loyalty to the death. Taylor’s last interview with Henry in the Bute House bunker, still doggedly playing down the crisis while trying to ignore Mrs McConnell measuring the curtains in the background, was a classic.

Even the fall of McClich has not daunted the devo-dvots. A couple of weeks ago, columnist Joyce McMillan lamented that, if Henry had had more vision, "he could not have been so easily derailed by a vagueness about his Westminster office expenses"... "A vagueness" - don’t you love it! In fact, it was an attack of vagueness that began in December 1987, lasted until April 2001 and netted him 39,000 of taxpayers’ money. Anyone who is prepared to give Henry the "Parnell, my dead king!" treatment has lost touch with reality as much as with any moral compass.

The Soviet Writers Union (Scottish chapter) has just one, overriding principle: "My party, right or wrong!" Nor does it take any paranormal powers of divination to jalouse precisely which party that might be. The SWU’s philosophy was never better summed up than in the title of a recent column by Peter MacMahon: "McConnell has no excuse - but he surely has to stay".

These are not so much writers as political anaesthetists. Their patients are the Scottish voters, who must be kept sedated in the face of extravagant outrages visited upon their moral, social, economic and democratic sensibilities. The Third Minister is under threat, so the Praetorian Guard forms a phalanx around him, to protect him from what, in a mature democracy, would be the inevitable consequences of his conduct.

In a real democracy, the relationship between the media and the governing lite is that of a pack of rottweilers maintaining surveillance on a gang of burglars. In Scotland, it more closely resembles the relationship between the Brigade of Guards and the sovereign. As the McFondle crisis deepens, the media commentators have become still more protective. As in the case of Henry, it is a storm in a teacup.

The allegations include claims that a drugs baron was a key organiser of a Labour fund-raising dinner before being shot dead six days later; that a constituency treasurer has admitted stealing 11,000; that three bank accounts were cross-fertilised, that one was used to pay a five-star hotel bill for McFondle’s then secretary and to fund his leadership campaign in 2000; that thousands of pounds of union donations went undeclared; that the First Minister misled parliament...

What journalist in his right mind could possibly imagine there was any kind of a story there? The consensus from the Soviet Writers Union is that it is "time to move on" and to "look at the bigger picture" - ie such geopolitical issues as dog-fouling and breastfeeding. There is no place for an intrusive media in the New Scotland: it would be decidedly "unhelpful".