Wings Over Scotland

The newspaper is a fantastic concept. A cheap, accessible product, it’s a brilliant way of keeping yourself broadly abreast of current affairs. You turn a page and are presented with a diverse selection of interesting stories, often on subjects you’d never have thought to go and seek out in the self-refining echo chamber of the internet.

(Theoretically links on websites serve the same purpose, but dodging “sponsored” advertorial, gutter-level clickbait, pop-ups, autoplay video and pages that judder and leap around so much while loading all this rubbish that you’re about 50/50 to have an epileptic fit before you can read the story, has made clicking on one into a game of Russian Roulette fewer and fewer people are willing to take a chance on.)

This site has never believed that the ongoing steep decline in newspaper sales is a fundamental problem with the format. Rather, the truth is that people stop buying papers because they’re full of garbage.

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Most of Scotland’s news outlets, including the Times, Herald, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Express and the BBC, run today with the story that one in three Police Scotland officers intend to leave the force in the next three years, according to a recent survey for the Scottish Police Authority.

(The print edition of the Scotsman makes it the front-page splash, although the article has mysteriously vanished from its website.)

But a couple of pieces of important information are inexplicably missing.

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You might have thought that the publication of the “Project Fear” book last month was an embarrassment for the motley collection of highly-paid but hapless Labour and Tory apparatchiks who ran “Better Together”, but it turns out there was worse to come.

Politics Home today reports what sounds like some alarming news:

“Pro-EU campaigners in Better Together talks

Informal discussions have taken place with Blair McDougall, who was campaign director of the cross-party body which successfully defeated the Scottish separatists.”

But put down that noose and cough up those pills, Europe-lovers.

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March 2015:

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An alert reader last night reminded us of a story from March this year:

It told a chilling tale.

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An extract from First Minister’s Questions earlier today:

That was Kezia Dugdale’s opening question. Despite the Presiding Officer making it absolutely clear that the question was improper and outwith Holyrood’s remit, the Scottish Labour leader went on to use her entire allotted time on the issue. She was then followed by Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson doing the same.

The people of Scotland are being done a grave disservice.

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Readers will probably recall that we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale’s recent claim on national TV that “50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read“.

It appeared on any possible interpretation to be complete nonsense, but Ms Dugdale – who’s pledged to make education the issue at the heart of her leadership – has been somewhat reluctant to clarify the statement.

Several queries from her Lothian constituents have gone unanswered, but one Wings viewer did manage to get a single tweet of response.

So let’s take a look at that link.

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Alert social-media users couldn’t have failed to notice Unionist activists and hacks working themselves up into a very great lather last night over (currently former) SNP MP Michelle Thomson. The ex-director of Business For Scotland has resigned the party whip and is now sitting, at least temporarily, as an independent while police conduct an investigation into some property purchases in which she was involved.

As yet no criminal activity by anyone has been alleged, and Police Scotland has said that it has no plans at the moment to even interview Ms Thomson, let alone arrest or charge her. As yet it’s a political non-story.

But the mere proximity of the member for Edinburgh West – previously the victim of a smear related to the Ashley Madison website hacking – to even a sniff of impropriety has triggered a paroxysm amongst the media and the beleagured opposition.

Amusingly, some senior journalists have even tweeted an accusatory blog written by Labour activist and regular BBC pundit Ian Smart, whose own membership of the Labour Party remains a subject of uncertainty after a series of abusive incidents – Scottish Labour have persistently refused to confirm whether he’s been expelled, despite having been “investigating” him since April.

But that’s not the most interesting piece of hypocrisy on show.

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Neil Kinnock, 1987:

Did voters come home to Labour? No.

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We know that the media isn’t normally shy about identifying which side of the Scottish independence debate people are on, especially if they’ve been behaving badly.

So we were a little puzzled by the papers this morning.

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Alert readers may recall that a few days ago we queried a dubious-sounding statistic from Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, who claimed that “50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read“.

We didn’t think that could be right, and dug up some figures suggesting that it was nonsense, but of course “the poorest kids” is a highly-flexible metric. Strictly speaking you could just mean the two poorest children in the country, and if one of those two can’t read there’s your 50%.

Luckily, we’ve now had some meat put on the bones of that claim.

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This is shadow Chancellor John McDonnell speaking to the Labour Party conference in Brighton just a few minutes ago (immediately prior to rather presumptuously inviting the Scottish electorate to “come home to Labour”):

We don’t recall those things happening. We feel sure that if they had, they would have been mentioned in the papers. Can any readers help us out?