Wings Over Scotland

9 June 2016:

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The Prime Minister with Andrew Marr this morning:

So it’s great to be a small oil-rich independent nation? Who knew, eh?

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Readers may have noted that Scottish Labour’s complaints about the delay in opening the new Forth Bridge have been uncharacteristically subdued.

It is, after all, rarely difficult to distinguish the branch office from a cuddly fluffy bunny made of candyfloss and children’s smiles. But this time we may know why.

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Sometimes we feel as though dumbing down Scottish politics until the Times’ political reporter Kenny Farquharson can understand it is our full-time job. It’s something we have to do quite a lot, whether it’s reminding him what manifestos look like, or pointing out that protecting EVERY child in Scotland from harm is actually a good thing, or even basic stuff like explaining what the SNP’s position on Scottish independence is.

So we’re pretty used to this sort of thing by now.

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Yesterday we reported on a rather weird Scotland on Sunday poll that the newspaper reported last month, which pollster ICM seemed to want nothing to do with and whose results weren’t made public until weeks after they should have been, and only under sustained pressure from this website.

Here’s another extract from the paper’s coverage:

Now, that’s some pretty shabby and misleading editorialising right from the off by the paper’s super-Unionist political editor Tom Peterkin. The SNP had pledged to replace the tax in their 2007 manifesto, and attempted to do so as a minority administration, but were foiled by the combined opposition of the Unionist parties voting to block proposals for a local income tax. The Nats accepted defeat and the pledge wasn’t repeated in the 2011 or 2016 manifestos.

But the poll is even dodgier than that.

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Last month Scotland on Sunday published some findings from a poll covering, among other things, backing for Trident and for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit vote.

We didn’t think much about it until a reader told us that Labour MSP Jackie Baillie had trumpeted the Trident result – a wafer-thin 43-42 majority in favour – in her column in the Helensburgh Advertiser. We were curious to see the finer details and set about finding the full data tables for the poll, which was conducted by ICM.

(Under British Polling Council rules, pollsters have to release full data within 48 hours of any headline findings being made public.)

Weirdly, they didn’t exist.

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Something remarkable happened in the last couple of days, readers. After we told you about the imminent delivery of the print edition of the Wee Black Book, there was a flurry of orders for several thousand more copies. And that extra influx of cash took the independence movement past a significant milestone.

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Readers, we’re honestly starting to believe that the entire Scottish media is some sort of elaborate Jeremy-Beadle-style prank.

Because the alternative – that they actually mean this stuff seriously – is just too bizarre and horrible to contemplate.

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You can almost physically feel it. Scotland’s opposition and media are absolutely champing at the bit today to try to make some “SNP BAD” political capital out of the tragic and appalling death of little Liam Fee at the monstrous hands of his mother and her grotesque, controlling partner.

Like kids at Christmas, some of them couldn’t even wait for morning.

But something odd struck us as we surveyed the coverage of the case: if the poor wee toddler had a Named Person, how come nobody could name them?

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We’re a bit behind, but we only just saw this.

Suddenly a 70% Remain vote in Scotland looks like a conservative estimate.

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There’s been a lot of chat on social media recently commenting on what seems to be a rather low-key approach to the Tory election fraud story.

Despite having the potential to cast the result of the UK general election into doubt, with dozens of Tory MPs under suspicion of being elected illegally, press coverage – particularly on the BBC – has been noticeably thin on the ground compared to, say, the days and weeks of sustained, new-content-free reporting on Michelle Thomson’s business affairs or Stewart Hosie and Angus MacNeil’s love lives.

(We learned very recently, of course, that the police still haven’t even spoken to Ms Thomson, over eight months after the allegations came to light.)

But even we were startled by this:

Yes, if you type “Tory election fraud” into the BBC website, the top result is for some unfathomable reason an article about Hosie and MacNeil, who are neither Tories nor under investigation for any kind of fraud.

Indeed, the current Tory election fraud story is nowhere to be found at all – the next most recent item on the page is from 2012 and about the Liberal Democrats.

We’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions.

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I was born to be a Rangers supporter. I had no real choice in the matter. My father was a Ger, as was his father and his father’s father. I was accepted that as soon as I was old enough to be lifted over a turnstile I would attend Ibrox, faithfully.

From 1964 (aged 5) I worshipped at the shrine of Rangers for almost three decades. Fortunately for me, my father was the least bigoted man you could wish to meet. His religions were the trade unions and Rangers. Because he wasn’t bigoted our next-door neighbour and dad’s friend used to take me to Parkhead to watch Celtic too, which I found thrilling as I was convinced the “Tims” could see right through me.

This caused me a bit of confusion at school, because some of my family were “Tims”. In fact my favourite aunty was a convert to Catholicism and was as devout and decent a Catholic as you will ever meet. The conflation of football and religion was as normal as the smog-filled air we breathed. It just was what it was. You were either Proddy Ranger or Timmy Celtic. It wasn’t to be questioned.

Except my dad questioned it, loudly and often. He tried to explain the wrongs of the situation to me many times. I remember asking him why he still was a Rangers man if he disliked the whole Proddy/Tim thing that went with it.

“They’re my team, son. The morons can’t change that”, he told me.

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