Wings Over Scotland

During the 2014 indyref, the astonishingly vast imbalance of the mainstream Scottish media was partly compensated by a huge rise in new media, with dozens and dozens of sites filling the gaping chasms where printed and broadcast media would have been in any country with a press worthy of the name at such an exciting time.

The subsequent shrivelling of that presence has been one of the least observed and explored phenomena of the six years since the referendum, and especially since the SNP’s election victory in 2016. The incredibly wide-ranging, mutually-supportive pro-Yes new media is now down to a tiny handful of outlets, most of which are barely read (and most of which would celebrate if the others burned down in a chemical fire).

There are many and varied reasons for this worrying situation, but before we get into those let’s have a quick look at who’s still who and what’s still what.

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The Sunday Times carries a quite surprising story today. (And that’s not just because the person in the picture isn’t actually Liz Lloyd at all.)

We’ll pause for but a brief moment to contemplate the assertion that this unelected, unaccountable civil servant might be “the second most powerful woman in the Scottish government” and then move on to the interesting bit.

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Much as we might wish otherwise, we haven’t been able to help noticing other pro-indy websites doubling down on the “BOTH VOTES SNP, TRUST IN QUEEN NICOLA, THE 10TH MANDATE IS THE ONE THAT’LL WORK!” routine lately.

And however much we’ve tried to get people to grasp the seemingly-obvious fact that Boris Johnson is not looking at this debate from the same viewpoint we all are, reality doesn’t seem to be getting through to everyone yet.

So we thought we’d try a new tack.

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If you didn’t already know that the BBC were going to run a character-assassination hatchet job on Alex Salmond tonight (and another one tomorrow), you could surmise it easily enough from the state of the Scottish media in the last few days.

We’ve almost lost count of the attack pieces on the former First Minister in the run-up to the show, from specially-commissioned opinion polls to conveniently-timed releases of allegations of unspecified “bullying” during his leadership and highly selective leaks from the documentary itself.

But it’s today’s Daily Record that dredges the depths of the journalistic sewer with a barrel and then scrapes the very bottom of it for the grubbiest, oiliest sludge it can find.

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Sometimes people are so stupid it’s legitimately scary. For example, all the Unionist politicians in Scotland who appear to genuinely think voters won’t notice that the recent exams catastrophe affected England (run by the Tories) and Wales (run by Labour) even worse than it did Scotland, and so they keep screaming for John Swinney’s head while having nothing to say about the even worse messes bursting all over their own parties’ respective jurisdictions.

(Esler misses the fact that the “deletions” were all actually retweets of a single tweet on the Scottish Conservatives which was deleted, but the point is the same.)

It genuinely boggles our mind that anyone, let alone a professional politician whose job it is to have their finger on the public pulse, could possibly imagine they’d ever get away with such utterly brainless naked hypocrisy, apparently believing that voters have memories less than 24 hours long and enjoy having their intelligence insulted.

(Incidentally, we can’t see any good answer to the exams problem. Either you have one year of massively artificially inflated grades, with all the tricky ramifications that presents further down the line, or you have a year of grotesque injustices to thousands of blameless individual students that are logistically impossible to remedy. The former is probably the lesser of the two evils, which poses the question of why the Scottish Government was too monumentally dim to see it coming and why it wasted a week defending the latter option before inevitably caving in and doing the sensible thing it was always going to have to do and should have just done in the first place.)

But it’s not just politicians.

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We’ve been having a closer look at the latest polling for next year’s Holyrood election (YouGov, from this week), and in particular the list numbers. We thought you might be interested in a little stat from them.

That’s the full breakdown. But that’s not the graphic that really tells the story.

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It is our grave and solemn duty to inform readers that there’s been another entrant in the New Act Of Union Of The Year competition. (This is an extremely niche joke.)

The details of this one, which is arguably even more bonkers than the last one, needn’t concern us here. But they’re a reminder of something we DO need to remember.

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Labour sub-faction the Scottish Fabians this weekend published a call for “a new Act Of Union”, an idea that’s been kicking around in the party for some time since failed branch office manager Kezia Dugdale came up with it in 2016.

And at first it sounds almost intelligent and democratic, proposing a clearly defined path by which any of the four constituent nations of the UK could become independent.

But then you get to the small print.

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It seems to be becoming apparent to the SNP’s aggressive woke wing that they badly overreached themselves with last week’s trainwreck of an NEC meeting. The backlash from ordinary members has clearly been severe, with senior party figures lining up to distance themselves from the decisions made, and one of the two contentious moves (the effective deselection of James Dornan) has already been reversed, although the one regarding Joanna Cherry still stands at the time of writing.

Yes-supporter social media was aflame last night as Stirling MP Alyn “Daddy Bear” Smith pulled an unexpected move in which he basically threw most of the Twitler Youth members of the NEC under the bus in an attempt to save himself.

To save you straining your eyes on that tiny text, key highlights follow below.

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So we guess this is an answer to our question:

But there are many more questions.

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Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.

Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!

But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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Late last week, Wings finally received a long-overdue full response to the queries we first made to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) in early April, regarding several matters connected to the failed prosecution of Alex Salmond.

(You’re supposed to get a reply in 20 working days. It’s been nearly four months.)

The unmappable fog-filled labyrinth that COPFS (under the Lord Advocate, W. James Wolffe QC), the Scottish Government and the civil service are attempting to construct around these matters is so tangled that it’s taken us a few days to sit down and make some sense of it, but the truth that’s being coaxed, painfully slowly, into the light is one that paints a truly disturbing picture.

We invite you to examine it for yourself and see if you disagree.

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