Wings Over Scotland

In a publishing environment where newspaper sales right across both Scotland and the UK have been suffering an unbroken decline for several years, the news that the Sunday Herald – the only newspaper to declare support for independence before the referendum – actually managed to INCREASE its sales in 2014 by a whopping 31% after coming out for Yes is a striking story.

Here’s the headline the BBC chose to cover it under this morning.

Seems legit.

Jim Murphy didn’t turn up at Westminster today to vote with the Tories for £30bn of austerity cuts, like 28 of his Scottish Labour colleagues did. That’s because he was taking some Scottish journalists to lunch to explain an important thing to them.

We’ve been sat staring at a blank paragraph for the last 10 minutes trying to think of something satirical to say. We’ve got nothing, readers.

Read the rest of this entry →

Willie Rennie, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, 12 January 2015:

“Mr Rennie said the [SNP] consistently changed its tune on what elections were about after the event and could use May’s poll to claim a mandate justifying a UK vote.”

Tavish Scott, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Tuesday 3 May 2011:

“If you want independence you can vote for it on Thursday.”

Still, at least he was wrong about Salmond fiddling the referendum result, eh?

Ever since the referendum, we’ve documented the various ways in which Unionists have constantly tried to rewrite history and inflate the magnitude of their victory.

We had Alistair Darling saying before the vote that 60-40 would have been too close for comfort, but then his team attempting to portray 55-45 as a resounding win, and we had the Labour peer Baroness Liddell try to claim the real result was 67-33 based on a near-Stalinist approach to voter attribution.

And yesterday, bless his heart, No campaign mascot Wee Willie Rennie had a go.

Read the rest of this entry →

Followers of our Twitter account will know that we’ve highlighted on many occasions since September the bizarrely angry attitude of much of the victorious side in the independence referendum. Despite having won, commentators and activists on the No side have undertaken a series of bitter and miserable articles and rants seemingly less than delighted at having come first in a two-horse race.

We’ve been a bit of a loss to work out why. They may have only cleared the bar by 5%, but it’s a reasonably comfortable margin if not exactly an easy cruise over the finishing line (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor). And embarrassingly we needed some help from one of the thicker sub-species of BritNat troll to finally work it out.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.

Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?

Read the rest of this entry →

Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, were greatly preoccupied in the days after the referendum with the thought that greater devolution to Holyrood could lead to Scottish MPs at Westminster becoming “second-class” members, should the move lead to restrictions on their voting rights in the Commons.

As yet we don’t know what will become of the drive for “English votes for English laws”. But it’s something of a moot point, because we know that as far as politics (and much else, but we’ll get to football another day) goes, Scots are second-class citizens in the UK already.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Scottish media has been predictably full of Sincere Jim Murphy’s proclamation this weekend that Scottish Labour is “a renewed party for a post-referendum era in Scottish politics. I want Yes and No voters alike to be able to look at the purpose and principles of the Scottish Labour party and find a home there.”

This is Labour’s 2015 general election candidate for the Western Isles seat.

Should we bother compiling a big list of similar “separatists are the filthiest scum of the Earth” quotes from other Scottish Labour MPs who are standing for election this May, or should we just consider the point made and move on, readers?

Pretty much the entire Scottish media yesterday carried a sad story about the funeral in Forfar of a young soldier who tragically died after serving in Afghanistan.

Private Mark Connolly wasn’t killed in combat but died after being punched by a comrade in a fight. Wrangling between his widow and mother had delayed his funeral for four years, and spilled over into angry confrontations as he was laid to rest, which the papers reported with considerable relish and plenty of photographs, and even video footage from the graveside.

The story was picked up in the Scotsman, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph’s Scotland section, STV News, BBC Scotland, the Courier and more. Curiously, though, one aspect of the unfortunate event was almost completely written out of the coverage.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s like they’re actually setting these up for us.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve had some fun with the appointment of John McTernan as Scottish Labour’s new chief of staff this week. But he’s far from the only talent in branch manager Jim Murphy’s backroom team. Particularly alert readers may recall an obscure figure from the independence campaign by the name of Blair McDougall, who was little-seen in the last year of the debate but we think was the director of “Better Together”.

It seems his modus operandi hasn’t changed much since the referendum.

Read the rest of this entry →

An unsurprising result.

Read the rest of this entry →