Ever aware of its need to deliver informed enlightenment to the populace, the state broadcaster has recently put up a “BBC Brexit Jargon Buster” page on its website. We’re not sure it was meant to be quite this candid.
This piece ran in the Telegraph – a newspaper with no Scottish edition and almost no Scottish sales – on Friday. Click to enlarge.
Our favourite line is:
“Think of what the UK would be like without the vast wealth generated by the 44bn barrels of oil pumped from British territory over the last 40 years.”
(Curiously, this is a rather different line to the one Critchlow took during the indyref, when he was the Telegraph’s full-time business news editor penning a string of articles about how bankrupt an independent Scotland would be despite possessing an asset that’s now apparently big enough to prop up an economy 12 times Scotland’s size.)
It’s worth keeping in mind whenever Unionists tell us (a) how volatile and worthless and used-up oil is, (b) how much Scotland depends on the kind benevolence of the UK to survive, and (c) why we can’t have another referendum until years after Brexit.
Your occasional reminder about who’s been governing us since we refused to take the responsibility for it ourselves.
To be quite honest, readers, if we’re going to leave our future in the hands of a Fox, we’d probably be better off with Basil Brush.
Wings Over Scotland is seven years old today (the period of time defined by the Good Friday Agreement as a “generation” in terms of referendums), and it doesn’t feel like a day over 25. Can we hurry up and have another indy vote before the entire country burns to the ground around our ears, please?
There was a certain uncomfortable 2018 inevitability this morning over the fact that where people were offended, arrests would follow.
And the burning of a cardboard model of the Grenfell Tower last night was certainly right up near the top in the pantheon of cretinously offensive things. Many victims of the appalling tragedy, which killed 72 people and injured many more, still haven’t been properly rehomed almost a year and a half later.
But if it’s a CRIME, we have some questions.
…if only we could find the courage among ourselves.
We’ve been through all the papers and there’s still absolutely no Scottish politics news, so we’re going to take a moment out for one of our brief but always-popular tangential forays into the world of football. All the usual disclaimers apply.
Because the parlous state of current Scottish journalism can’t just be observed on the politics pages, with all their partisan spin, quarter-truths and hackery. Sometimes you get a better idea of it by stepping back and looking at the broader picture, and rarely is that picture more clear than when it’s a picture of “Rangers”.
The Daily Record devoted only a tiny corner of its back page on Thursday to the club’s latest financial reports, and the bulk of the text was devoted to Dave King enthusing about what great news it all was.
Pretty much every other piece of coverage to be found in the Scottish press was the same, shrugging the figures off as of no notable significance and all someone else’s fault anyway (in this case former manager Pedro Caixinha, even though one must suppose he didn’t spend any more money than the board told him he could), and we waited in vain for any in-depth analysis in the Sundays.
And we couldn’t help thinking we’d been here before.
“…but with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.”
Labour have now been promising to abolish the Lords for around 110 years, including 37 years as the UK government. But wait! They’ve got more promises for you!
Alert readers may have noticed that for a non-holiday period, Scottish politics is a deathly quiet place at the moment. Papers are struggling to find anything to write about at all, and were beside themselves with joy this week when presented with the chance to fabricate a ridiculous “anti-Semitism” story about an obscure blogger criticising a trade union and fill several pages with hysterical fauxtrage over it.
The sheer dearth of anything happening whatsoever is typified by the Scottish Daily Mail’s front-page splash this morning.
It sounds dramatic – a potentially catastrophic en-masse exodus of Scotland’s doctors would certainly be a crisis. But anyone reading beyond the lurid headline will swiftly discover a rather less doom-laden reality.
Or so they say, at any rate. Near the end, we think.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
