Iain “but where will the money for an oil fund come from?” Gray gets a couple of sharp thwacks with a verbal Lochgelly tawse at today’s FMQs:
Yesterday we reported on a rather weird Scotland on Sunday poll that the newspaper reported last month, which pollster ICM seemed to want nothing to do with and whose results weren’t made public until weeks after they should have been, and only under sustained pressure from this website.
Here’s another extract from the paper’s coverage:
Now, that’s some pretty shabby and misleading editorialising right from the off by the paper’s super-Unionist political editor Tom Peterkin. The SNP had pledged to replace the tax in their 2007 manifesto, and attempted to do so as a minority administration, but were foiled by the combined opposition of the Unionist parties voting to block proposals for a local income tax. The Nats accepted defeat and the pledge wasn’t repeated in the 2011 or 2016 manifestos.
But the poll is even dodgier than that.
It was revealed yesterday that NHS Scotland now has the highest staffing levels in its history, a positive story justly celebrated in today’s Times:
It’s in there if you read closely, honest.
Last month Scotland on Sunday published some findings from a poll covering, among other things, backing for Trident and for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit vote.
We didn’t think much about it until a reader told us that Labour MSP Jackie Baillie had trumpeted the Trident result – a wafer-thin 43-42 majority in favour – in her column in the Helensburgh Advertiser. We were curious to see the finer details and set about finding the full data tables for the poll, which was conducted by ICM.
(Under British Polling Council rules, pollsters have to release full data within 48 hours of any headline findings being made public.)
Weirdly, they didn’t exist.
Something remarkable happened in the last couple of days, readers. After we told you about the imminent delivery of the print edition of the Wee Black Book, there was a flurry of orders for several thousand more copies. And that extra influx of cash took the independence movement past a significant milestone.
Alert readers may have noticed that we tend to slack off a bit at the weekend these days. There’s no point burning ourselves out with busywork at a time when there’s not very much going on in Scottish politics (certainly not in terms of independence, at any rate), and weekend traffic is always lower anyway.
So we’ve only just now got round to taking a proper look at something the online Yoon community and punditariat was getting itself very excited about on Saturday.
And it’s a fascinating piece of work.
Today we’re a boxing site, and that’s all there is to it.
Readers, we’re honestly starting to believe that the entire Scottish media is some sort of elaborate Jeremy-Beadle-style prank.
Because the alternative – that they actually mean this stuff seriously – is just too bizarre and horrible to contemplate.
You can almost physically feel it. Scotland’s opposition and media are absolutely champing at the bit today to try to make some “SNP BAD” political capital out of the tragic and appalling death of little Liam Fee at the monstrous hands of his mother and her grotesque, controlling partner.
Like kids at Christmas, some of them couldn’t even wait for morning.
But something odd struck us as we surveyed the coverage of the case: if the poor wee toddler had a Named Person, how come nobody could name them?
We rarely do stat posts now, because readership has settled to a pretty steady level (generally bobbing between around 250,000 and 300,000 users a month) and we’ve run out of ways to blow our own trumpet. But we’re making an exception this month.
The snide, arrogant, pompous and casually factually-inaccurate comment above was made by a founder/editor of a rather less popular Scottish political website. And in the (statistically unlikely) event that you happened to read it and became concerned, we thought you’d like a little more information about our “ever-decreasing readership”.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
