Wings Over Scotland

This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

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Even in a sluggish news season, it’s somehow extra-dispiriting to see a once-august newspaper like the Sunday Times fill its pages by trying to flog its readers reheated old cobblers from the previous day’s Daily Mail.

We’ve already shredded the towering stupidity of the story itself (the Times dutifully repeats all the exact same drivel about meal deals and loyalty vouchers), so we were pleased when social media presented a new angle on it.

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Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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In one way or another, a lot of politics is being played out in courts at the moment. Whether it’s Spain trying to crush the Catalonian independence movement, America frantically trying to impeach its President before he does something REALLY crazy or the UK trying to redefine the most basic of human freedoms out of existence without ever putting an act before Parliament, judges are having as much say as ministers in deciding the future shape of Western civilisation.

Of the most direct interest to Scotland, of course, are the UK government’s attempts to trample all over the 20-year-old devolution settlement.

The urgency of the situation, with Brexit now less than a year away, has driven the Yes movement into one of its occasional paroxysms of dispute about when a second independence referendum should be attempted, with SNP MP Pete Wishart attracting some overheated opprobrium by warning against acting in haste, and in the process serving up a juicy gift-wrapped opportunity for Unionists and a news-starved media.

But the furore masks a key issue that the Yes movement – and more crucially, the Scottish Government – has failed to address for the last three years, and which it’s really going to have to deal with at some point.

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The accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers – last seen charging the taxpayer an eye-watering £20.4m for just eight weeks’ work during the collapse of Carillion – today published a report into the declining number of high-street retail outlets in the UK.

BBC Scotland was keen to put a regional slant on it.

According to the article, Scotland had put in the worst performance in the country. But that didn’t appear to be what the report said at all.

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The front page of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

The problem: it’s completely and utterly made up.

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This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:

As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.

But that wasn’t the weird bit.

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The Scottish Daily Mail’s never-ending quest to find the very bottom of the SNP BAD barrel reached a new record depth today, somehow managing to blame the Scottish Government for… whiplash injuries.

But as ever, it turned out the Mail’s story was missing some key data.

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“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”

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The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.

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A large and imposing statue built in 1974 still stands today on Clyde Street in Glasgow. It depicts a woman called Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, who was one of the heroes of the anti-fascist resistance in Spain in the 1930s.

The statue was funded by “the British Labour Movement”, but Conservative councillors in the city protested angrily when it was erected and vowed to tear it down if they ever controlled the council (which cynical readers might consider an empty threat).

How times change. Read the rest of this entry →

An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.

And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.

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As the winter Scottish political news drought enters its 17th week, mainstream and alternative media commentators alike are scratching around desperately for anything to write about, which tends to end up in overlong reflective and/or hectoring essays about how to secure independence, invariably concluding that what we need is for everyone in Scotland to start thinking and acting exactly like the author of the article.

We’re going to aim for something a bit shorter and more practical, at least.

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