A "bridge too far" too far ...

When reading Brian Monteith's truly bizarre article in the Scotsman today "Is Forth fiasco bridge too far for SNP?" I was reminded of Betteridge's law, which states "any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

As Betteridge points out, "the reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."

Andrew Marr points out in his book My Trade "a headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic."

Engineers found in the eighties and early nineties that the design life of the bridge, as based on traffic levels predicted around the time when it was designed, built and opened in 1964, needed to be revised. On the basis of the observed, much higher traffic levels that developed subsequently they revised this down and indicated a replacement would be required by 1992.

As it says here, "within a couple of decades the bridge was struggling to cope. As the number vehicles on the roads soared delays and closures on the bridge grew. By the early 1990s the Scottish Office decided that a new bridge was needed. Six consultants were hired to investigate the best routes and designs and consider the possibility of a tunnel under the Forth. In 1992 they produced a report titled Setting Forth which argued for a bridge on the Beamer Rock route to the west of the Forth Road Bridge [...]

"At which point the idea ran into a blizzard of objection from environmentalists and opposition politicians. Alistair Darling [my emphasis], then Labour MP for Edinburgh Central, accused the government of ‘squandering’ taxpayers’ money on the report and declared that 95% of the Scottish population ‘would say no to that act of monumental stupidity’, i.e a new bridge. He was joined by Sir Menzies Campbell who urged the Scottish Office to drop ‘this ludicrous project’.

"But Ian Lang [...] concluded: ‘It is the Government’s intention to take forward the proposal…’ But the government never did. For reasons that are still not at all clear, the project was dropped."

The real task a good journalist should apply themselves to here is to find out what on earth happened in the nineties that resulted in the project being dropped, not to try and use everything as a pretext for an "SNP Bad" story, no matter how ridiculous.

Brian Monteith, to be fair, seems unique among inveterate unionist critics of the present SNP administration and all they stand for, in that, almost alone among them, he has not in the past indulged in the opportunistic nat-bashing that has led to many recent blushes and much embarassment of late among politicians and commentators who chastised the government for commissioning the Queensferry Crossing, the new bridge that will replace the Forth Road Bridge and which now can't be completed a day too soon.

Perhaps that is why Brian is the one to run this truly surreal "SNP Bad" story, whose emergence is entirely predictable and whose appearance has presumably been delayed while the unionist camp have scurried about trying to find someone whose arrant hypocrisy on the subject would not be too immediately, blatantly, hysterically obvious.