You still see them in Scottish towns on the back of cars that with a bit of luck might just make it through their next Mot, if the inspector isn't too handy poking about the undersills with his screwdriver. I'm referring of course to those emblematic window stickers that the Daily Record used to hand out to their readers, so that they might recognise each other, indulge in a quip about the football or what Angus Og had been up to that day. Their signifier was of course the legend, 'Real Scots Read The Record'. As marketing propaganda goes it's up there with the very best of them. You're not reading the Record ergo you're not a real Scot. No justification, no science to back this claim up, just that subtly racist suggestion, that you might live here, be born here, work, pay taxes and die here, but until you swallow the philosophy of the Daily Record, well you're really not quite one of us.
I loved the Record when I was a nipper, we didn't get it in our house, but my gran did. Weekend visits to leafy Cambuslang were always lit up, by me, up at the crack of dawn and hurtling across the road to Sandy's precariously balanced newspaper shed. The building hung out over the railway embankment, if memory serves me correctly it shoogled quite dangerously whenever the lightweight eight year old me breenged into it. I suppose it was the smell of the ink, or even in some cases the warmth of the fresh print bundles that I liked. Sandy used to let me cut the twine that bound the copies together with his old tartan clad penknife. Today Labour would probably have him branded a knife carrying nonce and banged up the moment he pocketed his knife and went out on his rounds. By the time I ambled back across the road, gran would have the coal fire on, with a full Scottish sizzling away in the pan. After breakfast, she'd peel the paper apart and give me the section I wanted to read and send me off to my den at the bottom of the garden, the Anderson shelter that my grandad built when he was home on leave.
I'd while away a couple of hours reading and trying to understand why Angus Og and Lachie Mor kept running away from big Mairileen. Other imponderables included the wrath displayed by the Reverend Peter McSonachan upon discovering Angus and Lachie had been on overnight adventures to the West Indies in the boat on the Sabbath, or Constable MacPhater and the Laird of Drambeg always being tricked out of a giant salmon or brace of grouse by Angus. It was a genuinely nice setting to some of my childhood. When we had holidays on Ard na Murchan, I'd spot the same characters, whilst stuck outside the Kilchoan Hotel in the car drinking bottles of lemonade and munching on packets of salt 'n 'shake - for hours on end.
Of course, as I got older it began to dawn on me that the Angus Og cartoonist Ewan Bain was just about the only Scottish thing in the paper other than the football results. It was only in my late teens, when I started reading the Scots Independent and discovered his cartoons were there too, that I realised he'd been a subversive nationalist deep within the bowels of the unionist Daily Record. All those fly digs at Westminster and the Labour ministers, whilst the front page had been cheerleading away in a blaze of Hope and Glory.
The article is basically a spinning operation on behalf of the Daily Record, Alastair Campbell and the Labour Party. It quotes Daily Record political editor Magnus Gardham (is it just me or does he not sound like Mavis from Coronation Street?) and his fantasy politics that the Sun are pointing out the truth about Labour's disasterous campaign and reporting those various celebrity blandishments for the SNP as all part of a blood and spunk pact between Salmond and Murdoch...
The irony for me is the Daily Record complaining about the supposed political direction of a 'downmarket English tabloid', remember 'Real Scots Read the Record', when they are in fact owned by Trinity Mirror an err English company, headed by the voluptuous Sly Baillie and these other people.
Now Sly and company must sit back sometimes and wonder what's gone wrong with a title that's gone from having the worlds second highest saturation level in its own market to having a smaller readership than its downmarket English tabloid arriviste rival The Sun in just over 20 years. In that period the Daily Record plummeted from sales of circa 750,000 newspapers per day to the current level hovering just above the 300,000 mark. The Scottish edition of the Sun sits somewhere in the region of 370,000 - ouch. In fact as recently as 2007 Trinity Mirror was valued at £1.5 billion, by the end of 2008 it had plummeted to a market value of £250 million - double ouch. Rather ironically in 2005 Ipsos Mori did a poll on the political affiliations of daily newspaper readers, you'll never guess which UK paper's readership had the strongest affiliation with the Labour Party, yep, some 61% of Daily Record readers support the Labour Party. Oddly enough the same poll indicated that 22% of their readers supported the SNP...Quite a base level that with nearly a quarter of your readership supporting a party, your editorial is vehemently opposed to. Now I reckon in the intervening years, particularly when we've had four years of a moderately successful SNP Scottish Government, that 22% figure may have shifted somewhat.
If I were a Trinity Mirror shareholder looking at the lovely and preposterously highly paid Sly, I'd be thinking some polling of the Daily Record and readers current political affiliations and some shifting of editorial stance might just be enough to up the dividends for that new holiday home on Barbados...One would hope that Sly would consider getting on the blower to new boy Eugene Duffy, the man in charge of the Nationals Division of Trinity Mirror including the Record and Sunday Mail... For blog followers, Eugene Duffy replaces Derek Stewart Brown, (my old Pcc Megrahi versus the lying Daily Record) nemesis who was previously managing editor of all the Scottish titles, but who has now been moved into the alluringly titled Head of Motors and Commercial Supplements - triple ouch.
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