Wings Over Scotland

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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As it happens, one of the things that we’ve been occupying ourselves with during the current news drought is pulling together a post called “The SNPBAD Files”, collecting all the desperate smear and innuendo of the Unionist press as it systematically tries to discredit every one of the 56 SNP MPs elected last May.

Until last night we hadn’t been sure which had been the most pathetically dismal. Was it the MP who still did a few haircuts in his barber shop on Saturday afternoons? The one who bought a derelict London house many years before he was an MP, renovated it with his own hands and now sometimes stays there when working at Westminster, rather than charging expenses to the public for accommodation? Or perhaps the one who tweeted that he was opposed to the concept of monarchy, the foul monster?

Now, though, we have a clear winner.

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We’re not saying there isn’t a lot going on at the moment, but today’s Daily Record actually devotes a page to telling women when to change their pants.

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Below is a 17-minute section of this afternoon’s John Beattie show on BBC Radio Scotland, featuring me and an amateur blogger with a keen interest in Pedigree Chum discussing the effect of the lower oil price on the Scottish economy.

(John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 January 2016)
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Happily, by the end of the show everyone on all sides was agreed that the lower oil price will actually benefit the Scottish economy overall, with the positive effects driving growth and outweighing the downside of lower corporation tax receipts.

So that’s genuine progress – next time some frothing Yoon screams “OIL PRICE! BLACK HOLE! SNP LIES! TOO WEE, TOO POOR!” at you, you can direct them here for categorical agreement from the Yes and No sides alike that actually the falling oil price makes an independent Scotland MORE economically viable, not less.

Unfortunately you’ll have to put up with a condescending, patronising arse sniggering randomly throughout, but it’s a relatively small price to pay.

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Referendum day, 18 September 2014:

“English tourists are cancelling holidays to Scotland because they fear ‘ill feeling’ towards them after the referendum, it emerged today.

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Normally when the BBC’s Andrew Neil asks a politician to put a figure on one of their policy proposals the interviewee should be wary, because a trap is about to be sprung.

For some reason that didn’t happen today.

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Governments, of all political stripes and nations, are often accused of being control freaks bent on constructing and enforcing a “nanny state”, where citizens’ freedoms are arbitrarily curtailed under a pretence of it all being for their own good.

Things from banning smoking and routinely snooping on private emails to forbidding people from wearing certain types of hats or expressing unpopular opinions (or even popular ones simply deemed unacceptable by a self-selecting elite) are justified for all sorts of social and economic reasons.

But where, if anywhere, should the line be drawn?

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The phrase most repeated by angry Unionists in the 16-and-a-bit months since the independence referendum is surely “once in a generation”. While the SNP quietly gets on with the business of government, having not mentioned a second referendum in its 2015 manifesto and not being expected to do so in this year’s either, the parties of the UK can’t seem to shut up about it.

The Tories in particular seem determined to make “NO SECOND REFERENDUM” the main plank of their 2016 election campaign, despite nobody actually proposing one.

(This is happening despite Ruth Davidson having said just nine months ago that her party wouldn’t block a second indyref, while Ed Miliband said that Labour would. However, Davidson’s organ-grinder, David Cameron, joined Labour in ruling it out just a few months later, which may explain Davidson performing a sudden U-turn akin to her famous one over more devolution.)

And when you boil it down to the brass tacks, what that means is that the parties of the Union want to hold the Scottish people prisoner.

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The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.

But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.

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Remember the scary old days, readers?

Thankfully, Scotland voted No and pensions were saved forever.

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