Wings Over Scotland

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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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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