Wings Over Scotland

The excellent Jon Ronson has had a couple of articles published recently promoting his imminent book about the phenomenon of “internet shaming”, most recently one in yesterday’s Guardian. He talks fascinatingly with and about people who’ve had their lives ruined because they said things that weren’t illegal, but merely deemed in some way unacceptable by a self-elected mob, often led by the professionally-offended.

Some of the victims are sympathetic and others less so, according to one’s personal tastes and prejudices. But the overall picture painted is one of a world in which it’s becoming harder and harder to express opinions beyond the crushingly bland.

We saw countless examples during the independence referendum, in which comments which were often very mildly rude at worst – calling someone a “minion”, say – were inflated by press and/or social media hysteria into shock-horror scandals. (Indeed, on a few occasions this site was itself the subject of the monsterings.)

Such witch-hunts were of course done in the furtherance of a political agenda – in those cases, in the service of a No vote. But it’s interesting to see a wider version of the tactic being deployed against the SNP in the context of a UK general election.

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Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.

IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.

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The Independent Press Standards Organisation has delivered its verdict on the Daily Record’s coverage of the Smith Commission recommendations on 27 November 2014, after we lodged a complaint with the watchdog body.

We attach its findings below. (Emphases ours.)

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We were going to bring you a report on the Scottish Conservatives conference in Edinburgh today (half the length of last year’s, and bereft of its glamorous sprinkling of Cabinet ministers), but we watched all of it and absolutely nothing happened.

They won the referendum and tax is bad. The end. See you next year!

This is the Minister for Care and Support, Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, on last night’s Question Time, letting Scotland know its status as an equal and valued partner in the UK, a partner whose democratically-elected MPs have the same right to have their voice heard on behalf of their constituents as those from anywhere else.

Glad we cleared that one up.

These are starting to get a bit surreal.

“Vote Labour, get SNP!”

“Vote UKIP, get trade unions!”

We’ve added them to the list. Keep ’em peeled, folks!

We got fooled like big old chumps earlier this afternoon. Scottish Labour apparatchik and former “Better Together” director Blair McDougall posted a series of tweets about whether the party who wins the most seats in a Westminster election gets to form the government, which sounded exactly like the ones Scottish Labour have been posting for the last few weeks before they were exposed as being nonsense.

The big comedy reveal was that they turned out to have been said by Alex Salmond in 2007, talking about the Holyrood election of that year which the SNP won.

It was a bona fide zinger. So what point did the cunning prank prove?

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It’s not often you get to see someone actually thinking out loud.

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Remember before the referendum, readers, when the £30bn cost of decommissioning oil platforms was a nightmarish unaffordable millstone around a future Scotland’s neck that proved it couldn’t be independent?

It turns out it wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

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This week Scottish Labour quietly abandoned their “biggest party forms the government” election campaign after it was comprehensively debunked by this site and, belatedly, the mainstream media. An alert reader reminded us this evening of how the party wasn’t always so attached to the rules.

Because back in 2007, when Labour was neither the biggest party nor the incumbent administration, it had a damn good try at forming the government anyway.

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All this year we’ve been noticing a curious re-writing of history in the Scottish and UK media. It’s spanned left-wing and right-wing press, and even Yes-friendly voices like Iain Macwhirter and the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier have been sucked in.

Yet it’s such a fundamentally bizarre misunderstanding of a political system that’s now been running in Scotland for 16 years that we’re bewildered at the way everyone’s suddenly decided that it happened.

The latest occurrence of this odd phenomenon was in yesterday’s Daily Record, and the subject is the newly-alleged “informal deal” between the minority SNP government of 2007-11 and the Scottish Conservatives.

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The election of Jim Murphy as branch office leader has so far failed to produce a shift in the party’s catastrophic polling figures north of the border, with most projections still suggesting that Labour’s Scottish seats will be reduced to single figures in May.

Last night we catalogued a series of its howlers since Murphy took over, culminating in a humiliating climbdown over some false claims about cancelled operations in the Scottish NHS. The party’s Scottish health spokeswoman Jenny Marra turned up on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the subject, and in doing so demonstrated exactly why Scottish voters are deserting it in hundreds of thousands.

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