Wings Over Scotland

The mainstream media is now, by our count, up to at least 13 sizeable articles on the Great Yes-Movement Schism Of 2017 – a minor online spat between a tiny handful of people who’ve never liked each other and most of whom the general public has never heard of – and shows no signs of tiring of gleefully revelling in the subject.

There’s nothing particularly surprising or even diabolical about that. As any reality-TV show viewer will tell you, viewers absolutely love to watch people fighting, and doubly so if it’s the summer silly season and there’s no real news. Most of the stories have attracted large responses and therefore lots of juicy and profitable clicks for tired hacks who long ago stopped having anything of any interest to say but still have to honk out 1000 words a week in order to get paid.

But the more sinister aspect of them is the way they’ve been weaponised to (further) demonise and silence the Yes movement. If someone attacks other Yes figures with a provocative, offensive and dishonest piece, the extra bonus for the media is that any legitimately angry response to it can be used as yet more proof of The Vileness Of The Cybernats: “Look! They even turn on their own if they dare disagree!”

For the Unionist press, that’s a win-win every way up, and there are some on the Yes side who seem only too willing to co-operate with the narrative.

Read the rest of this entry →

A reader sent us an interesting snippet of information today.

That seemed a startling fact, so we looked into it. And it’s true.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scottish media this week has started to rather resemble Argentina under General Galtieri’s military junta – everywhere you look are the ghosts of the disappeared.

We’ve already documented at length the sudden non-existence of the Herald’s madly inaccurate front-page lead story from Monday (along with the corresponding piece in the Evening Times). And today two more things joined the missing list.

Read the rest of this entry →

Here’s Daniel Sanderson in the Times in January this year, complaining that too few university students come from poor backgrounds and therefore the SNP are bad:

So he’d be chuffed if that situation improved, right?

Read the rest of this entry →

In case you don’t know, Alan Roden is the former Scottish Daily Mail politics editor who’s now Scottish Labour’s director of communications. We haven’t edited this pic in any way, those genuinely are two consecutive tweets he posted yesterday.

So this is almost too beautiful.

Read the rest of this entry →

Earlier today we reported on the mysterious failure of the Herald to notice that its front page lead story about supposedly poor ScotRail punctuality figures made a number of serious errors with regard to the facts, most notably confusing the excellent figures for last month with a 12-month rolling average which was significantly worse.

But as we read the rest of the papers, we noticed the oddest thing.

Read the rest of this entry →

This is the front-page lead on today’s Herald.

Let’s fact-check that, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re back in the archives again today, because there’s still no news. (The Herald is desperately trying to whip up outrage over trains arriving 61 seconds late, and David Torrance has finally turned up at the “OMG YES MOVEMENT SPLIT” party just as the last stragglers are heading home and the hosts are going to bed.)

And we’re particularly enjoying this one, for a whole list of reasons:

Read the rest of this entry →

In the continuing summer absence of any sort of Scottish politics news (the Sunday papers consist of Michelle Thomson understandably taking a swipe at the SNP in the Sunday Post, the Sunday Times spluttering in impotent fury that Michelle Thomson wasn’t prosecuted, and the Sunday Herald giving a glowing write-up to idiot Tory MSP Annie Wells while savaging sections of the Yes movement yet again – this time “older white men”), we thought you might enjoy a piece from the archives.

Discovered by an alert reader, this 1976 Times article features Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman discussing the seemingly-imminent prospect of Scottish devolution, to which he was implacably opposed and instrumental in defeating, ultimately leading to the collapse of a Labour government and the election of Mrs Thatcher.

Read the rest of this entry →

A series inspired by a Unionist blog insisting that “On a practical level, I do not believe for one moment that Scotland could thrive alone”, and which led to our thinking about some of the world’s other independent nations.

NO. 4 – SWITZERLAND

Switzerland has a problem, readers.

Those poor Swiss, eh?

Read the rest of this entry →

Today’s edition of The Times contains a textbook example of a phenomenon that we highlight regularly: how newspapers gradually unpick their own dishonest headlines to grudgingly admit a truth which is often the polar opposite of the initial claim.

Or as we more punchily tend to put it, “The Headline Is Always A Lie”.

This won’t take long.

Read the rest of this entry →

The BBC’s Reporting Scotland is, in our view, directly responsible for at least 80% of Yes supporters’ belief that the UK’s state broadcaster is biased against independence. Almost all of the worst examples of unbalanced or downright dishonest coverage over the last five years come from the flagship teatime bulletin.

But last night’s edition made even the most wearily cynical jaws drop.

Let’s just take that in for a moment.

Read the rest of this entry →