Wings Over Scotland

It really takes some going to stand out for especially terrible journalism in the Scottish press this week, given the vast acres of page-space that are still being devoted to truly abysmal, and borderline legally-actionable, barrel-scraping articles about the recent allegations made against Alex Salmond. So hats off to perhaps the only man who could possibly have achieved it.

Ladies and gentlemen, who else but David Leask?

Let’s see just who we meet, shall we?

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It’s around this time of year that we always enjoy a delve in the impenetrable enigma that is the membership of Scottish Labour. (As gathered together in the picture below during Jeremy Corbyn’s last trip to Edinburgh.)

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The Scottish media has really had to scrape the barrel to give a negative spin to some NHS stats today. The Herald, Daily Mail, Daily Record and Scotsman all feature a story concerning an increase in ambulance waiting times, noting that the number of callouts taking more than ten minutes has doubled in four years.

What they’re a lot more reluctant to reveal is that the reason for that is a deliberate policy change which has meant ambulances have been saving more people’s lives.

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Scotland’s newspapers are just one gigantic filthy avalanche of stinking, poisonous sewage today. They’re a disgrace to both journalism and humanity, and if we started listing the reasons why we wouldn’t be finished until sometime on Tuesday.

(Although some of it’s leaked out onto Twitter already.)

So instead, we’re going to do something we haven’t done before and probably never will again: we’re going to link you – unironically, unsarcastically and unarchived – to a post on the blog of the hyper-extremist SNP-hating BritNat fundamentalist zoombat “Effie Deans”, because astonishingly it occupies a moral plane infinitely far above any of the gutter-dredging, hate-crazed scum working in Scotland’s professional media.

That’s how far they’ve sunk. Effie Deans is looking down on them like an astronaut gazing from high orbit into the darkest depths of the Marianas Trench.

This is it here. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.

GERS Week is always a good time to catch Unionists saying mad stuff. But in the midst of a rant last night about (genuinely) how countries aren’t best running their own affairs but having other countries do it for them, the former “Better Together” chief, recent spectacularly failed Labour candidate and current [NOBODY KNOWS] Blair McDougall came out with a real peach.

We’re sure that the USA, Russia and China (to name but three off the top of our heads) will be startled and dismayed to learn that they’re no longer “serious” nations. But possibly not quite as surprised as the government of Denmark will be to learn that they’re in a monetary union with France.

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Earlier this evening the Herald’s poor demented David Leask made an extraordinary and completely untrue allegation:

We haven’t said a single word on the subject (we haven’t a clue if it’s true or not), so several people challenged Leask on the claim, and eventually got a response.

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The recent former Daily Record editor and even more recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with a rather audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.

But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.

We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.

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We did a poll, and the people have spoken:

Um, who was actually the UK government in fiscal year 2009/10, lads?

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Anyone who’s ever written to the BBC, or who follows this site, will already know that the Corporation’s instinctive standard response to any request for information is “Get stuffed, pleb. Just because you pay for us doesn’t mean we’re answerable to you.”

But they do tend to show a little more respect if you used to be the First Minister.

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We’re just going to reprint this piece every year, because only the numbers change.

Today saw the publication of the 2017-18 GERS stats, which are once again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the current decade stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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So Jeremy Corbyn’s four-day crusade to win back Scotland is going swimmingly. In the rare moments when his MSPs and Lords aren’t undermining him by attacking him over Brexit and anti-Semitism or making embarrassing gaffes about arms companies, he’s giving speeches like this one yesterday at bus-maker Alexander Dennis:

Boosting industry in Scotland benefits the whole of the UK. pic.twitter.com/6OJrr2NL9p

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 21, 2018

Presumably by promoting and supporting Britain’s manufacturing industry he means companies just like Dennis, and presumably supporting them would include, say, giving them grants to help develop new low-carbon technologies.

Which is a bit odd, because it’s not even two years since the Scottish Government did exactly that, and got sourly pilloried by the Scottish media and opposition – including Scottish Labour, who said there were “serious questions to be asked” about the award – for it being a “ridiculous” “cronyism” “outrage”.

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Whenever Scottish Labour rouse themselve to try to rally their handful of remaining supporters by whipping up some fake moral outrage – on this occasion about the Scottish Government giving a grant to an arms manufacturer (helped as always by an obedient Scottish press, and on this occasion by a fairly extraordinary on-air meltdown from Good Morning Scotland interviewer Gillian Marles) – we tend to just sigh and set the stopwatch going to see how long it’ll take to backfire in a horribly messy explosion.

But this one was especially splattery.

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