The Scottish Daily Mail’s never-ending quest to find the very bottom of the SNP BAD barrel reached a new record depth today, somehow managing to blame the Scottish Government for… whiplash injuries.
But as ever, it turned out the Mail’s story was missing some key data.
You’ve got to give them credit for audaciously shameless timing.
3 April 1989
3 April 2018
Still, though 29 years (and counting) is quite a while, it’s not even nearly a record.
“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”
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The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.
Stuck for any actual news at the tail of the Easter weekend, today’s Scottish Daily Mail reaches once again into the bag marked “Emergency Barrel Scrapings” and comes up with that old faithful beloved of all newspapers, a shock-horror “OMG LOOK HOW EXPENSIVE THE TRAINS ARE!” story.
It’s always an easy hit – partly because since a shambolic, fragmented privatisation the UK does have pretty much the most expensive railways per mile in the civilised world, but also because regular train users tend to mainly travel in the same area all the time, and are easily persuaded that they have it worse than people anywhere else.
So let’s ignore all the Mail’s ridiculous cobblers blaming the SNP – who have very limited control over the fare policies of Abellio (the Dutch state-owned company who run ScotRail) and who have been prevented by successive UK governments from nationalising the network – and just see if that’s true.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
