Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour’s announcement that it wants to increase tax for everyone earning over £20k (and therefore anyone on under that who fancies making a little bit more, or might do a wee bit of extra overtime), reflects its acceptance both that the far left is in charge now and that this year’s Holyrood race is virtually over already.

SNP party folk will “take nothing for granted”, of course, and some aficionados might find it fun to see which candidates slink into list seats after they’ve lost the votes which count, but I’m really much more interested in what will come after that.

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From an excellent letter in today’s Herald by Chris McLaughlin of Giffnock:

The only fault in Chris’ logic is that he’s a bit too generous to Labour.

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From a Daily Record vox pop today on Scottish Labour’s tax plan.

Seems there are some things nearly everyone agrees on.

The headline of this article is a personal opinion derived from true facts. The popular associate of a prominent anonymous and abusive internet troll has undertaken more than 50 lawsuits against the press, and has admitted in an interview with The Times that she’s “too thin-skinned” when it comes to people writing critically about her.

That seems to us to be fair and factual evidence in support of “litigious”.

“Bully”, meanwhile, is an honestly-held opinion related to those facts, based on the following definitions of that word from the Oxford English Dictionary:

For example, we consider that actively and publicly threatening to use your enormous financial power to sue someone, unless they back down over a highly questionable claim of defamation and donate money to your charity, is beyond reasonable-minded dispute “using your superior strength or influence” to “intimidate” them.

(This is particularly true if you interact with the person by unnecessarily involving your audience of 6.6 million social-media followers, a percentage of whom will then be highly likely to bombard them with abuse, whether you intend them to or not. Even aside from direct abuse, McGarry received in excess of 75,000 Twitter notifications simply as a result of Rowling’s tweets mentioning her.)

And there’s a reason we mention this.

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It’s been a fair few months since we last documented the Daily Record’s increasingly panicky attempts to save its own hide over its infamous eve-of-referendum “Vow”.

In its growing desperation, the paper bizarrely turns today to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, demanding that SHE should be the one to fulfil a promise that the Record made specifically in order to thwart Sturgeon’s lifelong goal of independence.

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We’re just going to leave this here.

“Penny dreadful for low paid: Inland Revenue figures back Labour claims public-sector workers would bear brunt of SNP tax plan

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An alert reader directed us to an article on finance site Bloomberg today:

It’s interesting to see a business and bankers’ perspective on something that we’ve already pointed out a number of times on Wings, namely that the lower oil price has at least as many upsides as downsides.

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Brian Spanner Fan Club chair JK Rowling yesterday moved quickly to correct some press reports that she’d abandoned her plans to sue independent MP Natalie McGarry over alleged defamation.

Tweeting to Herald reporter Martin Williams, she snippily noted:

The true nature of the “request” therefore seems unmistakeable – “make a donation to my charity or get sued by someone richer than the Queen”.

And we can’t help wondering whether that’s tantamount to blackmail.

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To the astonishment of all, it turns out that JK Rowling isn’t going to sue anyone after all. Or, as the ever-reliable-and-accurate Scottish Daily Mail puts it:

(It seems needlessly churlish and picky to also point out that McGarry currently isn’t an “SNP MP”, so we won’t do that.)

Instead, the author, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, intends to try to pressure McGarry into making a donation to her childrens’ charity, Lumos, which we can only presume is happy to receive money generated by what some people might regard as intimidation bordering on blackmail.

So that’s all well and good. If you’re going to bully people, after all, it’s probably best if it’s at least for a worthy cause. Rowling was full of praise for abusive Tweeter “Brian Spanner” when he raised some money for the same charity last year by selling t-shirts mocking the loony “Scottish Resistance” campaign group.

But not all charitable donations attract such gratitude.

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On the rare occasions when this site discusses football, and in particular if we mention the three-year-old Championship club known as “Rangers”, we get complaints on two grounds: one, that football has nothing to do with politics, and two, that we risk alienating supporters of the club who also back independence, of which there are unquestionably a significant number.

The second complaint is one we’ve dealt with in detail here. But the first one is more important. Because whether you’re talking about the original club which died in 2012 and was put into liquidation or the new one currently challenging for promotion to the top division for the first time, “Rangers” is a totem of the Unionist establishment in Scotland, and the way it’s treated by the media tells us at least as much about that establishment and that media as any amount of political journalism.

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Social media amused itself briefly tonight over a spat between former SNP MP (now independent) Natalie McGarry and children’s author and hedge enthusiast JK Rowling.

It started like this:

And then some stuff happened.

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The Scottish Daily Mail’s front page lead today is so galactically despicable that it’s easy to overlook another story that it bundles in with the same “SNP BAD” attack.

While excoriating Dr Philippa Whitford for having the sheer shameless gall to help save women’s lives in her holidays, the alleged newspaper also devotes a page-high article to an attack on another Nat MP, George Kerevan, for employing his wife.

The headline, however, omits a rather key fact.

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