Wings Over Scotland

The Steve Bell cartoon in yesterday’s Guardian caused a fairly predictable reaction. SNP supporters and Yes voters were offended, some Guardian journalists drew ludicrous defensive comparisons citing Charlie Hebdo – as if people had called for Bell to be beheaded, rather than just expressed the opinion that the cartoon was nasty and racist – and lovers of comedy went off scratching their heads after fruitless attempts to understand what the joke was supposed to be.

(“It’s a quote!”, shouted quite a few people, naming about a dozen different historical figures as the alleged source of a line about trying everything once, but none of them offering anything by way of explanation on how that was connected to any comment or policy of Nicola Sturgeon’s or the SNP’s.)

Anyone naively thinking that the publication of the cartoon was just an unfortunate lapse or oversight will have been disappointed by today’s paper, which carries another painfully unfunny and incomprehensible Nat-bashing effort from Bell, although this time the offence is limited to the portrayal of Sturgeon and Alex Salmond as a pair of stereotypical kilt-wearing Jocks.

(The caption explains the strip as being purportedly about “Salmond and Sturgeon’s Highland fling”, but we haven’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. We’re not aware of them having visited the Highlands recently and we can’t think of any characteristic of full fiscal autonomy that resembles a traditional dance.)

Unionists, meanwhile, indignantly pointed out to some complainants that attacking the SNP isn’t the same thing as attacking Scots as a whole. But as media hysteria about the apparently-unconscionable prospect of Scottish MPs influencing a UK government reaches fever pitch, that distinction is getting less and less meaninfgul.

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Lovers of blood sports enjoyed a very special treat on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland, as Gordon Brewer got his teeth firmly around the throat of hapless Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray and shook him like a rag doll for ten toe-curling minutes.

We’ll have the entire 18-rated clip for you later, but Brewer was having so much fun tormenting Murray by repeatedly demanding an answer to the question of whether his party would rule out an electoral deal with the SNP that he didn’t notice when, at about the 15th time of asking, he actually got one.

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Jim Murphy’s practiced air of nonchalant bonhomie was coming apart at the seams all over today’s “Good Morning Scotland” (from 2h 10m). Pressed hard by presenter Bill Whiteford, the beleaguered Scottish Labour branch manager spluttered and blustered and interrupted constantly in a desperate attempt to stop Whiteford from even finishing any questions, never mind getting answers to them.

Murphy tried determinedly and repeatedly to punt the hopelessly-discredited line about the biggest party forming the government, on the sole basis that it had always been the case before, seemingly unaware that the election wasn’t being held in the past. He even tried to use the recent catastrophic Ashcroft polls to Labour’s advantage.

You can marvel at the entire nine-minute trainwreck by clicking the link below. But let’s just pull out that one argument and take a closer look at it.

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Seemingly oblivious to the mockery of voters, the Labour and Tory sides of the media are today doggedly continuing with their quest to convince the electorate that voting for the SNP will let both the Tories and Labour in.

In the latest in a long series of hilarious diatribes from the right-wing English press, today’s Daily Mail (English edition only, natch) carries a mad rant from Max Hastings about “the SNP’s almost Stalinist agenda” imposing a nightmarish “socialist paradise” on the people of England via Ed Miliband and “Nicola Sturgeon, red in tooth and claw”.

Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical Daily Record has an editorial leader – unbylined but with Torcuil Crichton’s stubby, inky fingerprints all over it – desperately screaming the official Scottish Labour line that the Nats are closet Tories, “the arrival of dozens of SNP MPs in Westminster would make a Conservative government more likely”, and that “without Labour, no one else will be able to stop Tory attacks on the poor”.

(It seems to have entirely escaped Crichton’s attention that Scotland voting Labour, including in 2010, has utterly failed to stop Tory attacks on the poor for decades.)

So now we know – voting SNP will bring about a socialist, Stalinist paradise of Tory governments attacking the poor. Glad we cleared that one up.

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We’ve been observing for some time now that Scottish Labour deputy “leader” Kezia Dugdale has something of a tendency for making claims with a pious, strident conviction that’s in directly inverse proportion to how true they are.

And as we DO like to get our facts straight before we run around asserting things, allow us to illustrate our point with a case study.

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Yesterday we noted that nothing had yet been heard from Scottish Labour’s policy review into universal services, launched amid much hoopla in September 2012 off the back of Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech.

The party has spent much of its time since then attacking the SNP over social justice, claiming that universal benefits are a middle-class subsidy, hurting the poor by spending money on giving the well-off free stuff they could afford to pay for.

Professor Arthur Midwinter, the Labour-friendly academic the party hired to lead the review, was widely reported by the press vowing to “devote at least two days a week for up to two years to prepare a series of reports for the commission, which is being co-chaired by Labour MP Cathy Jamieson and finance spokesman Ken Macintosh”.

Those two years have come and gone, and nearly six months more, and there’s been no sign of a single report from the commission. And it turns out there never will be.

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The Scottish media’s daily MurphyGram this morning (which is dutifully reported by the Scotsman, Herald, Courier and doubtless more) is that a vote for Labour in next year’s Holyrood election won’t mean a return to tuition fees for university students.

We’re not absolutely sure why a Holyrood election pledge is news just weeks out from a Westminster one, but we’ll let that slide, because we’re more interested – as ever – in what the reports DON’T say.

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Perhaps we’re just being over-sensitive, readers, but we think the Daily Record might be a little bit upset with us.

That’s the editor of the semi-popular Scottish Labour fanzine, Murray Foote, pictured above this afternoon apparently issuing his own very special honours list, but it’s not the crankiest thing the Record’s published in the last 24 hours.

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The comical furore about The Nurse Who Definitely Isn’t An Actress shows no signs of making sense any time soon.

24 hours and several demented pages of hysterical tabloid shrieking later, we’re still not sure whether a No activist and Labour supporter from Clackmannanshire is called Suzanne Duncan (as “Better Together” called her until at least June last year) or “Suzanne Hunter” (as the Daily Record calls her), though a bit of Facebook detective work suggests the latter.

We do at least seem to have cleared up her employment history, as the Daily Record has now very quietly and subtly changed its article of last night, which claimed she’d worked for eight years at a hospital that’s only been open for five.

But a whole bundle of other questions remain unanswered.

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Some of the Scottish media has picked up on our post yesterday about the senior Labour official calling on Labour voters to tactically vote for the Tories against the SNP. The Scottish Sun and The National both carry the story, reporting that Robert McNeill has resigned his positions on the party’s Policy Forum and as chair of the East Lothian constituency party, having first joined a growing list of Labour figures to have wiped their social-media history.

(Kathy Wiles, Braden Davy, Yvonne Hama and Susan Dalgety, among many others, had preceded the hapless McNeill in attempting to obliterate their tracks after this site uncovered some of their unsavoury activities.)

And today has seen the discovery of a tweet from last month by the Labour peer Lord Moonie, caught in conversation with a couple of Conservative bloggers expressing the view that Labour would be much happier in coalition with the Tories than working with the SNP. (Echoing comments from other party sources a couple of weeks ago.)

And it got us to wondering why they don’t just do it.

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The excellent Jon Ronson has had a couple of articles published recently promoting his imminent book about the phenomenon of “internet shaming”, most recently one in yesterday’s Guardian. He talks fascinatingly with and about people who’ve had their lives ruined because they said things that weren’t illegal, but merely deemed in some way unacceptable by a self-elected mob, often led by the professionally-offended.

Some of the victims are sympathetic and others less so, according to one’s personal tastes and prejudices. But the overall picture painted is one of a world in which it’s becoming harder and harder to express opinions beyond the crushingly bland.

We saw countless examples during the independence referendum, in which comments which were often very mildly rude at worst – calling someone a “minion”, say – were inflated by press and/or social media hysteria into shock-horror scandals. (Indeed, on a few occasions this site was itself the subject of the monsterings.)

Such witch-hunts were of course done in the furtherance of a political agenda – in those cases, in the service of a No vote. But it’s interesting to see a wider version of the tactic being deployed against the SNP in the context of a UK general election.

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It’s not often you get to see someone actually thinking out loud.

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