Wings Over Scotland

Ruth Davidson opened First Minister’s Questions yesterday with an attack on the Scottish Government over the performance of the NHS, citing a report that the service faced “pockets of meltdown” this winter.

But later in the session, alert backbench SNP MSP Clare Haughey claimed that the report being quoted by the Tory leader had only in fact examined THREE Scottish hospitals. So we thought we’d better check.

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The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.

But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.

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We’ve been poring over the fascinating document released yesterday by the Fraser Of Allander Institute, examining in detail the prospects for the Scottish Government’s budget in the coming years.

Admittedly at first we were chiefly doing it in order to embarrass the increasingly angry and belligerent BBC presenter Andrew Neil, who insisted repeatedly last year that there’d been no real-terms cut to the Holyrood budget since the Tories came to power.

That claim put Neil at odds with all manner of people pointing out that the opposite was true, to which we can now add the FoAI:

But we already knew Andrew Neil was an idiot, so that was no big deal. It was another chart in the document that caught our eye and made us think.

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The old rules (NB these apply to us):

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but party time‘s over.

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As several alert readers have already spotted, our Twitter account was suspended at some point in the early hours of this morning. We’ve had no email from Twitter offering any sort of explanation, but it seems most likely to have been at the behest of a Daily Express hack called Siobhan McFadyen who’s been huffily bleating to the company’s executives over the weekend about this tweet:

The reason we tweeted that comment is detailed here and here. But apparently it’s an opinion that you’re no longer allowed to have.

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Daily Express hack Siobhan McFadyen had a quite extraordinary meltdown on Twitter last night and this morning after we highlighted an appalling article that she’d written for Saturday’s paper.

After angrily attacking other users for a few hours, by the end she’d declared a full-on DefCon One, sending out a desperate plea for hauners from entities as diverse as the Times, the New York Times, the Telegraph, the NUJ, the Washington Post, Guardian Scotland, BBC Radio 4, the Drudge Report, the CEO of Twitter and JK Rowling.

At the time of writing, none had replied.

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We’ve already highlighted the abominable state of the Daily Express this week, but an article in today’s edition is surely some sort of record-breaking low.

Hold onto your hats, folks, you won’t believe this one.

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The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:

It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.

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Supporters of Scottish independence have known for years that the civic “nationalism” espoused by the Yes movement bears no relation to the so-called “blood and soil” varieties found in many other countries. Every racist or ethnic-nationalist organisation in Britain – the BNP, the EDL/SDL, the National Front and so on – was stridently No.

But a YouGov poll released today puts numbers on it for the first time.

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In your media today:

Oh, right. One of THOSE days.

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