We were a little perplexed this morning by the Daily Record’s banner headline.
And not just because of the unusually generous use by the Labour-supporting paper of the term “SNP Government” (rather than “Scottish Goverment”) on a good-news story.
It’s not as if the Financial Times doesn’t have history with dropping great big payloads of high explosive into the middle of the independence debate late on a Sunday night. But a piece coming up in Monday’s edition (and online tonight) is going to choke a few breakfasts in London tomorrow morning.
The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.
1. The honesty patrol
Cybernats!
2. The lonely hours
Cybernats!
3. Cybernat of the week
CYBERNATS!
4. The Mars bar at your seat
Idiot.
5. You’d need a heart of stone
Idiot whines about cybernats.
Eesh. Grim stuff. Let’s hope for a more pleasant week to come.
The following paragraph closes an article in today’s Observer.
We’re almost lost for words. But not quite.
Sorry we haven’t posted much today, folks, but with a pulsating League Cup semi-final and then Scotland’s first game in the Six Nations (about which events we shall speak no more) it’s been a big day for sport. You know, this stuff:
We hate to be so petty and chippy, but after 40-odd years it wears you down. We’re pretty sure it’s a mistake they’ll stop making if we’re actually a proper country.
It takes some doing to make even BBC News presenters look a little uncomfortable at the sheer depth of your ignorance when it comes to Scottish independence, so we probably ought to offer some sort of commendation to this guy:
Poor Anas Sarwar. He just can’t get anything right.
Doing his best to join in with the Daily Mail’s month-long witch-hunt, Labour’s “deputy” leader in Scotland leaps on an abusive and disturbingly racist-looking comment aimed at him. It’s nasty all right. It could well qualify as “hate”. But who’s it from?
We like to put a bit of extra effort in in January. The excitement of a fresh new year, coupled with the need to shake people out of the festive-period stupor that otherwise kills momentum stone dead, calls for 110%. Even so, with the slow opening week and then losing most of a weekend to a server outage, we weren’t expecting this.
Not only were January’s pageview stats more than 30% up on December, but they also smashed the all-time record set in November by well over 100,000.
We were expecting the turnout for the No campaign’s Great Train Mobbery to be a lot better for the afternoon session, on account of the fact that nobody would have to get up at 6am to go and leaflet a dark, freezing-cold railway station.
The opposite turned out to be true.
While we struggle through a tax return and our intrepid spotters document the second half of Better Together’s Big Train-Station Day Out, we figured you might like to read the Scottish Daily Mail’s story on the operation.
It’s a strange piece, opening with a dramatic “evil cybernat spies under the bed” headline and an opening paragraph about “sinister twists” and how we’re a “notorious abusive blog”, but then the remainder of the text twice repeats the point that we asked spotters not to harass anyone and that we’re merely challenging BT’s untruths.
It’s like their heart just wasn’t in the smear anymore.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
