Wings Over Scotland

This week the Scottish media went in quite heavily with the news that Ruth Davidson had signed up “Scottish fishing industry leaders” to back the UK government over the Scottish Government, after the latter had warned that Westminster planned to sell out the industry again during Brexit negotiations.

To be honest we didn’t pay it a lot of heed, assuming that “Scottish fishing industry leaders” just meant Bertie Armstrong again – a longstanding ultra-staunch Unionist and Leave supporter with a track record as a reliable anti-independence rentaquote – and nothing in the coverage led us to believe otherwise.

But then we saw a picture:

Mr Armstrong is the white-haired and bearded chap standing immediately to the right of Davidson in the photo, with his hand on the top corner of her pledge. But who’s the fellow immediately to the left of her?

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Below is a clip from last night’s Reporting Scotland. It features regular election loser Christine Jardine, an ex-BBC journalist who the Lib Dems have tried unsuccessfully for years to crowbar into Parliamentary seats all over Scotland (like Aberdeenshire East in 2016, Gordon in 2015, the European Parliament in 2014, Aberdeen Donside in 2013 and Inverness and Nairn in 2011).

She’s currently contesting Edinburgh West, which the party has some credible hopes of winning, having held the seat for almost 20 years prior to 2015. And it seems that her former employer has decided to try to give her a helping hand.

And, y’know, they’re really not allowed to do that.

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Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

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In the last few days we’ve been talking a lot about the bizarre perversion of arithmetic that now seems to dominate political campaigning in the UK, and which has the media so tied in knots that the poor Telegraph now thinks nothing of saying the SNP gained council seats, lost them and gained them again in the space of four paragraphs.

But numbers are confusing and we’re very hungry at the moment after some major dental surgery made eating difficult, so we weren’t really paying attention until Ruth Davidson started talking about pies.

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Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.

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The BBC has just published an article explaining its controversial claim that the SNP actually lost seats at last week’s council elections, despite going from 425 to 431. The analysis was carried out by Prof. David Denver of Lancaster University, and we’d asked him about it yesterday.

He’d very kindly sent us a copy of the same article he’d sent the Beeb. We attach it below. We’ve highlighted in bold the only bits that didn’t make it into the BBC piece.

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This one definitely looks dodgy.

We, um… we don’t think they DID show that, Kez.

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So the French presidential election result is in. And we’re getting early reactions:

Well, those are a bit weird, aren’t they?

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Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this.

Because we’ve been telling you it was coming for half a decade.

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When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.

So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?

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It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.

Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.

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Some manner of strange, alien vortex swallowed the very concept of arithmetic as we know it earlier this evening. The answer to the question “what is 431 minus 425?” was variously reported by the media as -7, -14, +31 and -30, with nowhere that we could find offering the seemingly obvious answer of “6”. But that was only the beginning.

Because language wasn’t immune from the sudden redefinitions either. The Tories, who finished 155 seats behind the SNP, nevertheless proclaimed themselves not only the winners of the election, but the sole winners.

So let’s have a quick review of the facts.

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