Wings Over Scotland

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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So it seems we opened quite a can of worms when we broke the story of the Scotland In Union donor leak last month. Yesterday saw the disturbing tale of police armed with battering rams seizing computers and phones from David Clews of right-wing Unionist group UK Unity, a former SIU member suspected of being the source of the leak.

For the record we have absolutely no idea if he’s the source or not (and we don’t know who is – the file was passed to us anonymously through a now-deleted email account), but however much of a mad zoomer someone might be we find ourselves rather uncomfortable with the deployment of such an excessive display of intimidatory police force in the defence of the interests of the wealthy establishment.

Clews might be a Unionist – and a fairly unpalatable one at that – but we very much doubt it was ever going to be necessary to smash his door down, and it’s striking to see the magnitude of the state’s reaction against one of its own the moment they might step out of line and do anything to displease either the titled and landed gentry who provide most of SIU’s money, or their loyal bootboys.

So having been subjected to a ridiculous arrest (and completely spurious, months-long confiscation of electronic equipment) ourselves last year for doing our job, we didn’t view the raid with quite as much schadenfreude as readers might expect.

But it wasn’t the most disturbing thing to arise from the story.

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Alert readers may recall as far back as November, when we ran an article on a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail hatchet job which claimed that “the SNP has squandered £2bn” in its ten years in office, but only actually listed around £800m in supposed waste.

The independent press regulator IPSO is still in a great big sulking strop with us for reasons we can’t remember, so rejects any complaints that come directly from Wings, but the good thing about having a 300,000-strong army of readers is that some kind soul will usually take on the task for us.

And this one turned out to be fascinating.

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Which we were yesterday, we couldn’t help noticing this:

And that reminded us that we still had some more poll results to reveal.

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We’re a bit annoyed about this, because we were going to give the Absolute Fanny Of The Week award to Anas Sarwar every week as a joke, but now it seems we can’t.

So that’s a professional journalist who’s studied the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, or OBFA, so intently and diligently that he keeps calling it “OBAF” instead. But that’s not the stupidest of it.

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The very strange man who is David Leask, chief reporter at the Herald, has been hard at work with a shovel ever since we ran a couple of stories on Monday.

Accusing this site of publishing “an implausible blog about our paper this week, based on some unchecked &, well, weird assumptions”, he curiously neglected to specify what those assumptions might have been, while embarking on a long, rambling and bewildering rant about what does and doesn’t constitute “fake news”.

Leask’s argument, at least in so far as we can make any sense of it at all, is that even deliberately and knowingly made-up lies printed in mainstream newspapers are not, and can never be, “fake news”.

That’s a term which he insists only applies to spoof sites pretending to be real news outlets, which we’d presume – although it’s by no means clear – means the likes of The Onion or the Daily Mash.

Which is an odd angle.

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Late last night in the House Of Commons saw one of the most significant votes in the history of UK constitutional politics. A group of Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose an amendment which would have protected the central building block of Scottish (and Welsh) devolution – the principle that any powers not explicitly reserved are devolved – from the UK government’s attempted huge power grab under the cover of Brexit.

Those very same Scottish Tory MPs had previously pledged to stand up for Scotland’s interests regardless of loyalty to their party, and had repeatedly expressed their grave disappointment at the deeply unsatisfactory condition of the Withdrawal Bill.

Last night they could have fixed it by supporting the amendment (backed by every other Scottish MP right across party lines), which would have tipped the arithmetic and ensured its success. Instead they betrayed every voter in Scotland – including their own – by waving the bill through unamended and passing the buck to the unelected House Of Lords, which has no representatives from Scotland’s most popular party.

This morning, BBC Scotland led on the fact that it snowed a bit in Scotland in January.

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We’ve commented quite a few times in recent months about the Scottish media’s habit of running statistical stories rendered meaningless by the absence of any context.

The reasons for this aren’t necessarily sinister – sometimes journalists are just lazy or the full stats are hard to establish because like-for-like figures aren’t published – but usually it’s just a way to get an SNP BAD story out of isolated numbers which, if the full picture was presented, would render that impossible.

The above story from STV News today contains no furious rentaquotes from Labour or the Tories (at least not yet), so we should place it in the former category. Nevertheless, we do feel it’s our duty in a general sense to provide readers with the information that the Scottish media can’t be bothered to, so let’s do that.

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Ruth Davidson appeared on Good Morning Scotland today as part of their series of interviews with what they call “the leaders of the larger parties in Scotland”, which for some reason is also including the Lib Dems and Greens.

You can listen to the piece – which showcased the usual evasive, time-killing waffle technique Davidson employs as standard, noticeably uncomfortable only when Gary Robertson pressed her on welfare-cuts suicides – for yourself if you want, but in our Panelbase poll last month we discovered a difference between Davidson and Nicola Sturgeon we thought was quite interesting, so we’re going to talk about that instead.

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The Scottish media has been operating at what former BBC journalist Paul Mason once called “full propaganda strength” for the last few weeks, trying to inflate some pretty standard seasonal fluctuations into a “WINTER NHS CRISIS”.

One of the more egregious examples came yesterday when the state broadcaster’s Scotland editor Sarah Smith announced to the nation that 100,000 patients had waited more than four hours at A&E departments last week – a pretty impressive feat since in reality only a quarter of that number actually visited A&Es in Scotland last week, and four-fifths of those were seen in under four hours.

The 100,000 figure in fact refers to an entire year, not a week. Depending on how you look at it, Smith misrepresented the reality by either 2,000% or 5,200%. Yet at the time of writing we’re not aware of the BBC having issued any correction or apology for this, well, let’s be generous and say “error”.

The stats record the time taken for patients presenting at A&E to be dealt with (that doesn’t just mean “seen”, but seen, assessed, and then either treated, admitted or sent home). For the whole of 2017 the figures for Scotland were:

Patients dealt with in four hours or less: 93.1%
In eight hours or less: 99.2%
In 12 hours or less: 99.9%

Which doesn’t sound like too much of a crisis.

Alert observers will of course be aware that this is all entry-level basic operating mode for the media. Even if they weren’t trying to whip up politically-motivated “SNP BAD” material – and most of them are – it’s a deep journalistic instinct to exaggerate and hyperbolise everything into the worst news possible in order to drive traffic and clicks.

But does it work?

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