Wings Over Scotland

Kenny McBride is a Wings reader. This is his personal experience and view. 

A couple of weeks ago Ian Small, BBC Scotland’s Head of Public Policy, wrote an article for the Scotsman addressing the question of anti-independence bias at Pacific Quay. Naturally he defended the Corporation strongly, but he also made what seemed like an invitation:

“The issue over BBC content being posted online brought a further consequence, with over 200 people turning up at Pacific Quay in Glasgow last week to demonstrate against BBC bias. We offered to talk. That offer still stands. We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-making.”

I was sceptical, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I decided to act.

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Chris McEleny is an SNP councillor. This is a personal opinion.

The open sewer of some newspapers has been in full torrent this week. However it surged over the overflow pipe with the hysteria in last weekend’s Sunday Mail.

In a deranged editorial it actually argued that Alex Salmond should stay out of the SNP “whatever happens with his legal challenge and the subsequent police investigation”.

In other words, “regardless of innocence or guilt, regardless of whether the procedures are judged just or unjust we just don’t like him”.

Actually it’s not what they like or don’t like. It’s fear that motivates much of the mainstream media against Salmond.

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There’s a very weird story in the Scotsman today.

As alert readers will have noticed from the third paragraph, the headline is actually an inexplicably negative spin on the fact that journeys on the line INCREASED last year by 5.8% to a new record high of 1.5 million.

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It’s been a tough few days for the Daily Record. So maybe we should forgive this:

Let’s just enjoy those pie charts for a moment.

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It’s an almost impossible task to identify the most despicable sewer-dredging piece of “journalism” that the Scottish press has spewed out in the past 10 days or so of demented obsession with as-yet-unsubstantiated allegations by two unnamed women against Alex Salmond, but today’s Sunday Mail must be a strong contender.

The paper runs a four-page orgy of hypocritical moralistic shrieking based on Salmond’s outrageous and unacceptable behaviour in, um, thanking the people who donated to his crowdfunder to challenge the process by which the story was improperly leaked to the media. The monster.

And if you think that’s a ludicrously thin basis on which to create a front-page splash and three pages of screaming drivel inside, wait until you actually see some of it.

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Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.

One man, of course, led from the front.

Ouch.

As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers in two decades of being an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.

Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.

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Scotland’s newspapers are just one gigantic filthy avalanche of stinking, poisonous sewage today. They’re a disgrace to both journalism and humanity, and if we started listing the reasons why we wouldn’t be finished until sometime on Tuesday.

(Although some of it’s leaked out onto Twitter already.)

So instead, we’re going to do something we haven’t done before and probably never will again: we’re going to link you – unironically, unsarcastically and unarchived – to a post on the blog of the hyper-extremist SNP-hating BritNat fundamentalist zoombat “Effie Deans”, because astonishingly it occupies a moral plane infinitely far above any of the gutter-dredging, hate-crazed scum working in Scotland’s professional media.

That’s how far they’ve sunk. Effie Deans is looking down on them like an astronaut gazing from high orbit into the darkest depths of the Marianas Trench.

This is it here. And that’s all we have to say on the subject.

GERS Week is always a good time to catch Unionists saying mad stuff. But in the midst of a rant last night about (genuinely) how countries aren’t best running their own affairs but having other countries do it for them, the former “Better Together” chief, recent spectacularly failed Labour candidate and current [NOBODY KNOWS] Blair McDougall came out with a real peach.

We’re sure that the USA, Russia and China (to name but three off the top of our heads) will be startled and dismayed to learn that they’re no longer “serious” nations. But possibly not quite as surprised as the government of Denmark will be to learn that they’re in a monetary union with France.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

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