Alert Wings readers will have noticed recent press coverage of events surrounding North Lanarkshire Council, centred around a scandal of sexual harassment by former council leader Jordan Linden.
Here we present the full story, directly from one of the SNP councillors involved.
So we were a couple of days early on this one.
In fairness to the Scottish press, it’s had a lot of stuff to fit in recently.
There’s quite an interesting piece in today’s Sunday National detailing the extremely unequal representation of various parties on the BBC’s network politics shows in the last month, in which readers will be astonished to learn that the SNP (and Scotland in general) come off very poorly.
(Five appearances compared to eight for the Lib Dems, 40 for Labour and a startling 143 for the Tories.)
As it happened, it coincided with our coming by a list of people who’ve appeared on the Corporation’s nightly newspaper-review show, so we wondered whether the brave members of the press whose job it is to scrutinise politics independently might have redressed the balance somewhat.
Let’s find out.
This is the editorial in today’s Scottish edition of The Times:
It seems to be an increasingly popular viewpoint in the country’s media.
Yesterday we reported how the only people who were risking the privatisation of key ferry services to the Western Isles were the Scottish Labour politicians and media crowing about how the decision to keep them in the hands of publicly-owned operator Caledonian MacBrayne had been made for political reasons.
(Which, were it true, would render the award of the contract illegal under EU law.)
We had no idea how low they were about to sink.
On Wednesday the Daily Record ran this story:
It didn’t have to wait long for the “questions” to be answered.
The Unionist media has leapt on former SNP adviser Alex Bell’s blog post about the economic case for independence this week like a starving dog thrown a sausage.
It’s been wringing articles out of it for days, the latest being Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record, in which the unembarrassable hack (last seen trumpeting an entirely imaginary £20bn increase in Holyrood’s budget from the Smith Commission proposals) rather audaciously takes someone else to task over an economic “lie”.
Bell’s article is such self-evidently weak sauce that we haven’t bothered with it until now. But as it seems clear that the papers are going to talk about nothing else for the forseeable future, we may as well point out the obvious.
From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:
It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?
The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.
Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.
Seemingly oblivious to the mockery of voters, the Labour and Tory sides of the media are today doggedly continuing with their quest to convince the electorate that voting for the SNP will let both the Tories and Labour in.
In the latest in a long series of hilarious diatribes from the right-wing English press, today’s Daily Mail (English edition only, natch) carries a mad rant from Max Hastings about “the SNP’s almost Stalinist agenda” imposing a nightmarish “socialist paradise” on the people of England via Ed Miliband and “Nicola Sturgeon, red in tooth and claw”.
Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical Daily Record has an editorial leader – unbylined but with Torcuil Crichton’s stubby, inky fingerprints all over it – desperately screaming the official Scottish Labour line that the Nats are closet Tories, “the arrival of dozens of SNP MPs in Westminster would make a Conservative government more likely”, and that “without Labour, no one else will be able to stop Tory attacks on the poor”.
(It seems to have entirely escaped Crichton’s attention that Scotland voting Labour, including in 2010, has utterly failed to stop Tory attacks on the poor for decades.)
So now we know – voting SNP will bring about a socialist, Stalinist paradise of Tory governments attacking the poor. Glad we cleared that one up.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
