When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.
So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?
It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.
Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.
Some manner of strange, alien vortex swallowed the very concept of arithmetic as we know it earlier this evening. The answer to the question “what is 431 minus 425?” was variously reported by the media as -7, -14, +31 and -30, with nowhere that we could find offering the seemingly obvious answer of “6”. But that was only the beginning.
Because language wasn’t immune from the sudden redefinitions either. The Tories, who finished 155 seats behind the SNP, nevertheless proclaimed themselves not only the winners of the election, but the sole winners.
So let’s have a quick review of the facts.
With all 32 councils now having declared, the Scottish local elections are over and the SNP have won again, taking 431 seats. Last time round in 2012 they took 425.
You might think you know the difference between 431 and 425. But you don’t.
On the occasion of the local elections.
Vote ’til you boak, readers. Seriously.
We had a little fun last night at the expense of Ian Murray, the sole surviving Scottish Labour MP, who’d sent his constituents a list of his achievements in office that was actually a blank sheet of paper. And in fairness, he was extremely quick off the mark in response, producing a video tweet within four hours.
And it seems that he’s actually been keeping VERY busy.
We’ve never tried to put a precise breakdown on how much of the falsehood pumped out daily by the Scottish political media is due to deliberately misleading spin and how much of it is simply due to journalists who are really, really terrible at their jobs.
But there’s plenty of both in today’s Times.
It’s the holidays, so the papers are desperate to fill space and the political parties are all trying to help out by sending them helpful press releases which can be slotted directly onto pages, titled “PARTY X CONTINUES TO SUPPORT POLICY Z WHICH IT HAS ALWAYS SUPPORTED. ALSO, THE OTHER PARTIES ARE BAD”.
Scottish Labour’s contribution is a piece in most papers today reiterating their demand for the Scottish Government to hike the top rate of income tax – a policy on which Labour stood at the last Westminster and Holyrood elections and which was quite stupendously comprehensively rejected by voters, but which Labour inexplicably feel the SNP should implement anyway.
And that’s all very well and good, because Kezia Dugdale gets paid the best part of £80,000 a year by taxpayers and she’s got to say something all day to justify it. The trouble, as we’ve noted at great length on this site, is that so many of the things she says aren’t actually true.
For a party which insists the last thing it wants is a second independence referendum, it’s rather odd that the Tories are doing everything in their power to turn next month’s council elections into exactly that.
Still, let’s do our bit to help them out.
There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times, about a cunning plan by which the Scottish Government could bypass the veto of Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and legislate for a second independence referendum – forcing a direct showdown in which the UK government would have to openly trample the Scottish Parliament and its electoral mandate.
If pursued, it would reopen the current absurd argument in which the Unionist parties claim that the Scottish Government has no “mandate” to pursue a second referendum, despite mandates arising solely from the ability to win votes in Parliament.
(If an absolute majority for one party was required to pass legislation, Holyrood would of course have done absolutely nothing for most of its life.)
And that reminded us that our last Panelbase opinion poll was so vast we still hadn’t finished releasing the results of it, including one rather surprising finding.
Yesterday we noted that while Scotland’s opposition parties and Unionist media were united in the staunch belief that the Scottish Government should do something to improve the poorly-performing economy over which it has almost no control, none of them seemed able to offer so much as a single actual policy they wanted changed or implemented to this end.
Today the Daily Mail continued the attack at length:
So we thought we’d see if anyone had come up with anything yet.
We’ve been trying to take advantage of the current lull in politics, with Holyrood in recess for Easter, to have a bit of a semi-break. Having to watch all the Unionist party conferences in March is always toxic to the soul, and with the gargantuan torrent of insane lies emanating from the indyref2 and Article 50 developments to deal with as well, this year’s was even grimmer than usual.
So when all the papers went heavy on this morning’s news that the Scottish economy had a slight retraction in the last quarter of 2016 and filled their pages with rentaquote drivel from the opposition parties about how it was all the SNP’s fault, our first instinct was to simply direct readers back to this piece from last October, detailing how the Scottish Government – by design – controls almost none of Scotland’s meaningful economic levers, and go to the movies again.
But then a headline in the Scotsman’s article changed our minds. Because we thought we should see which policies they actually wanted changed.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
