Earlier this evening the Herald’s poor demented David Leask made an extraordinary and completely untrue allegation:
We haven’t said a single word on the subject (we haven’t a clue if it’s true or not), so several people challenged Leask on the claim, and eventually got a response.
The recent former Daily Record editor and even more recent Yes convert Murray Foote caught a few people’s eyes on Twitter this morning with a rather audacious use of the phrase “decent Tories like Adam Tomkins”.
But it was a piece he wrote for The Times that we found harder to swallow.
We’ve got some spare time today, so let’s go through it all.
So Jeremy Corbyn’s four-day crusade to win back Scotland is going swimmingly. In the rare moments when his MSPs and Lords aren’t undermining him by attacking him over Brexit and anti-Semitism or making embarrassing gaffes about arms companies, he’s giving speeches like this one yesterday at bus-maker Alexander Dennis:
Boosting industry in Scotland benefits the whole of the UK. pic.twitter.com/6OJrr2NL9p
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 21, 2018
Presumably by promoting and supporting Britain’s manufacturing industry he means companies just like Dennis, and presumably supporting them would include, say, giving them grants to help develop new low-carbon technologies.
Which is a bit odd, because it’s not even two years since the Scottish Government did exactly that, and got sourly pilloried by the Scottish media and opposition – including Scottish Labour, who said there were “serious questions to be asked” about the award – for it being a “ridiculous” “cronyism” “outrage”.
Whenever Scottish Labour rouse themselve to try to rally their handful of remaining supporters by whipping up some fake moral outrage – on this occasion about the Scottish Government giving a grant to an arms manufacturer (helped as always by an obedient Scottish press, and on this occasion by a fairly extraordinary on-air meltdown from Good Morning Scotland interviewer Gillian Marles) – we tend to just sigh and set the stopwatch going to see how long it’ll take to backfire in a horribly messy explosion.
But this one was especially splattery.
We couldn’t help noticing one particular Rory Bremner tweet last night.
And we thought, “Well, WE know someone who predicted those things.”
So this didn’t go down too well on social media last night.
Prof Bueltmann, who’s made her life in Scotland for 20 years, was (as far as we can tell) the only independence supporter to speak at a poorly-attended rally in Edinburgh calling for a fatuously-named “People’s Vote” on Brexit.
Pretty much everyone else on the platform had campaigned for No in 2014 in one way or another, from Gavin “grassroots” Esler to Rory “best of both worlds” Bremner, Ming “freeze out the Nats” Campbell and Malcolm “Medics for No” Macleod.
And when some Twitter users expressed a modicum of resentment at being ordered to get behind the “People’s Vote” campaign by the very people who are responsible for Scotland still being shackled to the UK and therefore dragged out of the EU in the first place, the Unionists got terribly hurt and sniffy.
A couple of months earlier than we were expecting it, we’ve had the Sheriff’s decision on our court hearing a month ago against Kezia Dugdale.
tl;dr version: we won.
One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).
The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a single decade.
At the very least, then, you’d imagine that the period might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.
The like-for-like sales total of the same newspapers today is 492,353.
Today’s Daily Record has a “shock” poll revealing what this site told you a week and a half ago – namely that just under half of Scots want a second referendum on Brexit. (Our Panelbase poll said 46%, the Record’s YouGov one says 48%.)
Amusingly, the paper describes this minority as “overwhelming support” for another vote, and runs an editorial leader demanding that Labour and the SNP unite to back such a proposal.
And, y’know, we may as well make the obvious point.
Seriously, anyone got anything?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
