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Comment superfluous 73

Posted on November 28, 2016 by

heraldnew

What they expect you to believe 309

Posted on November 25, 2016 by

For some reason the Unionist community has this week been turning the bullhorn up to maximum on the subject of pensions. Most likely provoked by the publication of Dr Craig Dalzell’s fascinating “Beyond GERS”, the usual suspects have returned to the scaremongering tactics deployed during the indyref, attempting to terrorise the elderly with blood-curdling threats of destitution once again.

mcdougallpensions

It’s a bewildering approach, given that the situation regarding pensions is one of the few around independence about which there is known certainty. The UK government already pays the state pension to millions of people outside the UK, under rules which would apply in exactly the same way if Scotland became a “foreign” country.

But just for fun, let’s look at exactly what the situation would be in the monumentally implausible event that Blair McDougall was telling the truth for once.

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The light at the end of the tunnel 128

Posted on November 24, 2016 by

We haven’t dignified the current media-imagined “crisis” in Scotland’s railways with coverage thus far, for obvious reasons, but it seemed worth briefly letting someone much better qualified to comment than us bring some perspective to the issue.

iaindochertyrailways

(From today’s Herald. Click to enlarge.)

Readers might well feel justified in wondering why it wasn’t until someone took it upon themselves to go to the trouble of writing to a newspaper, after days of sustained press hysteria, that some sane and balanced commentary on the situation appeared. But then again, if Mr Docherty’s expert opinion had been sought in the first place, we wouldn’t have been able to have a solid week of “SNP BAD” all over the airwaves.

The Prophecies 261

Posted on November 23, 2016 by

One of the videos below is a genuine “Better Together” campaign broadcast, pulled from TV at the last minute (despite costing £50,000 to make) and today revealed by Buzzfeed. The other is a spoof we made in June 2014.

Good luck figuring out which is the real one, folks.

The news we’ve all been waiting for 247

Posted on November 22, 2016 by

Namely, that of a 100%-certain victory in indyref 2:

mcternanpredicts18

We might take the rest of the day off to celebrate.

What’s left out 288

Posted on November 21, 2016 by

As alert readers will know, one of the primary purposes of this website isn’t just to tell people when the Scottish and UK media is lying to them, but to teach readers how to spot that for themselves. And one of the keys to learning that is to ask yourself what a story in the press is leaving out as well as what it’s telling you.

So last week, when several newspapers went on an orgy of shock-horror reporting about SNP MPs’ expenses – focusing mostly on aeroplane flights and only quoting figures for a small handful of MPs who’d allegedly been claiming far more taxpayers’ money than their Unionist predecessors – alarm bells started ringing everywhere.

gravytrain

And just as we’ve taught them to, Wings readers leapt into action to do the hard work that Scotland’s professional journalists don’t want to do, in order to provide Scots with the facts that the media doesn’t want them to know.

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The same across the world 117

Posted on November 20, 2016 by

This article by US writer Emily Robinson is probably more instructive than anything we could post today (the Sunday papers are a news desert again, frankly). It doesn’t take a very great feat of imagination to transpose the American terms to Scottish ones – for “Berniebros” read “cybernats”, etc. Phantom news, it seems, is universal.

Groundhog days 279

Posted on November 18, 2016 by

Nobody could ever accuse the Scottish press of underpromoting its grievances – alert readers will still recall, for example, the long procession of articles with near-identical content in the Daily Mail last year about SNP MPs and their “second jobs”. For 2016, though, the media’s obsessive repeating of the exact same story every few weeks has manifested itself over Nat members’ expenses.

gravytrain

So let’s take a quick look.

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The glass of news 342

Posted on November 17, 2016 by

Can be half-full or half-empty. Neither of the stories below is untrue.

jobs1

jobs1a

Readers can make their own judgements on the Scottish Daily Mail’s agenda.

Scottish Labour clarity update 130

Posted on November 15, 2016 by

One of our favourite things to remember is what Scottish Labour regional manager Kezia Dugdale said when she was elected to the head-of-branch post 15 months ago:

dugdalestandsmall

We like to periodically check how that’s going.

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In remembrance 349

Posted on November 13, 2016 by

I haven’t worn a poppy in 20-odd years, for my own reasons.

But this chilling clip, from the 2005 BBC series “Auschwitz, The Nazis And The Final Solution”, is the most important thing about war that humanity should never forget.

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Wait, what did we miss? 108

Posted on November 13, 2016 by

You did WHAT in May now?

sldwon

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