Wings Over Scotland

We’ve often said on Wings Over Scotland that we really don’t mind if journalists are biased. Everyone is biased, including us – we’d just rather people stopped pretending to be impartial when they weren’t. But what we do really hate about the Scottish media is just how astonishingly bad at its job it is.

A particularly striking example arose recently.

Pretty much every newspaper and broadcaster in the country carried the sad story of former Labour MP Paul Sweeney‘s fall from besuited lawmaker to skint benefits claimant. And yet not a single one of them asked the question that literally every single reader of the story would have been shouting at their screen.

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More great news, right?

Except, sadly, it’s completely untrue.

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Good news, everyone – there’s been another surge.

Go back to your constituencies and prepare for indyref2! Yes, again.

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This site is not terribly inclined towards sympathy for popular children’s author Joanne Kathleen Rowling. We’re still waiting on an apology for her donating a crucial million pounds towards ensuring Scotland stayed ruled by Tories and got dragged out of the EU against its will, on the bonkers premise that voting No would magically put Scots in a position of unprecedented popularity and power within the UK.

As a smart piece of analysis it’s right up there with “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”, and it would have been nice if at some point in the last six years she’d held her hands up and gone “Y’know what, I called that one really badly wrong. Sorry about the whole Tory/Brexit thing, everyone. We all make mistakes”.

(Wings, of course, got it exactly right at the time.)

We still don’t think she deserves seven years in prison, though.

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Oh no, someone’s let Ian Murray say words again.

There’s only one small problem with that complaint.

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We’re STILL officially on holiday, readers, and that means that for the last four months we’ve barely watched the news or looked at a newspaper, because who wants to be depressed by being lied to by a never-ending parade of scumbags when they’re on holiday? Not us, and we’ll tell you that for nothing.

So we’re grateful to alert readers who still point us to stuff like this.

EIGHT YEARS since Scottish Labour got into bed with the Tories to ensure the Tories kept ruling Scotland, and they still haven’t grasped why they don’t get the “protect us from the Tories” vote any more. Honestly, folks, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious.

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We’ve been fobbed off again with another generic response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which again wholly fails to answer our simple and legitimate journalistic question, and to which nobody has been prepared to sign their name.

(We should also note in passing that not a single Scottish newspaper appears to have followed up on the story in that last link except the Sunday National, btw.)

But this one is considerably more disturbing. You can read it below if you want to know what shameless, transparent corruption sounds like.

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Some in the independence movement got quite excited yesterday about a widely-reported poll showing that 63% of Scots want a new indyref in the next five years. It reminded us that we’d had a question on the subject in our own Panelbase poll earlier this month that we hadn’t got around to talking about.

Because of what we wanted to find out, that question was asked in a slightly strange way, so let’s quickly explain.

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Our ongoing quest to discover just who is actually willing to take responsibility for the actions of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) with regard to the trial of Alex Salmond and its aftermath took another diversion yesterday when we received a reply from HM Inspectorate of Prosecutions in Scotland.

It had sounded like a promising lead. After all, HMIPS’ apparent purpose is to “inspect the operation” of COPFS, “improve the way COPFS serves the public” and “make COPFS more accountable”, all of which are exactly what we were after.

Sadly we had another disappointment in store.

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We’ve just learned that we’ve lost the appeal over our defamation by the then-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, when she repeatedly and publicly made the appalling, damaging and wholly untrue smear that I was a homophobe, even though the appeal judges all agreed with the original sheriff that the smear was false and defamatory.

But when it comes to deciding the verdict in a defamation case, it seems that the fact that absolutely everyone agrees I was definitely defamed is, to borrow a phrase from later in the judgement,“of no materiality”.

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We’ve received a response from the Scottish Government to our follow-up letter of last week regarding the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. It’s attached below.

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When the news isn’t news:

Lots of Scottish newspapers (most notably everything in the Herald And Times Group) had already ducked out of providing ABC figures at all, but this will be a godsend for the rest to save their growing embarrassment.

Wings readers can remember the pitiful state of the last published figures here.