The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.
But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.
We’ve already highlighted the abominable state of the Daily Express this week, but an article in today’s edition is surely some sort of record-breaking low.
Hold onto your hats, folks, you won’t believe this one.
The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:
It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.
Supporters of Scottish independence have known for years that the civic “nationalism” espoused by the Yes movement bears no relation to the so-called “blood and soil” varieties found in many other countries. Every racist or ethnic-nationalist organisation in Britain – the BNP, the EDL/SDL, the National Front and so on – was stridently No.
But a YouGov poll released today puts numbers on it for the first time.
The BBC lunchtime weather forecast of 15 October 1987 is now fondly looked back on as a moment of shared national doh-what-are-we-like? comedy, in the same vein as a Morecambe and Wise Christmas show or something.
But the reality was very dramatically different.
Eternally angry Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins has been even shoutier than usual this week, purple-faced with rage about the fact that the SNP has decided to spend some of its own money (not taxpayer cash) asking people for their opinions.
It’s a curious argument from a member of a party that’s been rejected in successive elections in Scotland in 1964, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1974 again, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2015 and 2016, but keeps turning up and barking orders anyway. You’d think the first 50 years might qualify as a hint.
More or less since the morning of 19 September 2014, the Unionist parties in Scotland have kept up an unceasing chorus of “You lost! Accept it!” directed at the entire Yes movement, but primarily the SNP (despite the SNP having never to date disputed the result or called for a re-run of the referendum).
Readers may not be entirely astonished to discover this morning that at least as far as Scottish Labour are concerned, that principle only applies to other people.
Because we’re pretty sure there’s already a name for when political parties set out an “alternative programme of government”.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gave an interesting interview to Good Morning Scotland just after 8am today, in which he expressed a number of careful, measured and qualified views on a variety of subjects including currency.
But obviously Scottish people are much too stupid to understand stuff like that, so the BBC quickly dumbed it down for them.
The problem is that there’s a difference between simplifying and falsifying.
The Scottish Mail On Sunday felt obliged this weekend to devote newsprint in what’s technically an actual newspaper to a piece of snark that might just be a new all-time low in the highly competitive barrel-scraping field of “SNP BAD”:
Half a page was given up to a bunch of sour complaints that the First Minister had built in FIVE MINUTES on her itinerary on a school visit (aimed at encouraging girls to take up traditionally male careers) for people to get selfies with her.
Stand by, folks. It actually gets worse.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
