Wings Over Scotland

We wonder how many papers we’ll see this in tomorrow.

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We weren’t going to take Professor Adam Tomkins’ hysterical “NATMAGEDDON!” article for this week’s Spectator seriously enough to pull it apart line by line.

But once we’d wiped the tears from our eyes we thought we’d better do our job.

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The comedy “obnoxious Tory” stereotype/respected BBC pundit (delete as applicable) Adam Tomkins has a dramatic opinion piece in the Spectator this week, which also commands the magazine’s front cover.

It’s a handy one-stop compilation of some of the most comprehensively-debunked Unionist myths and lies of the past couple of years, livened up for readers with some standard-issue wild-eyed frothing lunacy shrieking about one-party states, “Orwellian” dictatorships, the evil Nats are coming for your children, blah blah etc.

If we were to pull up every absurdly laughable line we’d be here all day, and nobody reads 5000-word articles, so we’re going to restrict ourselves to a single example.

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Today’s Herald reveals that the new Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Frank McAveety (who was last seen in the headlines leering at a 15-year-old girl visiting the Scottish Parliament), has hired Bob Wylie as a special adviser.

Wylie was communications director of the scandal-riddled Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), which readers may recall from last year’s banning of an advertising campaign for this site on the city’s Underground after receiving one complaint about it.

But he’s somewhat more famous for his part in an expenses junket which saw several of the quango’s senior management bill taxpayers for a 2008 “fact-finding” mission to Manchester whose timing just happened to coincide with the UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg being played in the same city.

Wylie’s appointment follows the controversy which arose when Labour gave convicted drunken arsonist Mike Watson a job as education spokesman in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. And the two hirings threw some light on a thought we’d been thinking since reading a Kevin McKenna column in last weekend’s Observer.

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Was feeling a bit left out as the only person involved in the independence debate who hadn’t been accused of being in the pay of MI5. But no more!

Thank goodness for thirsty old Ian.

The media seems to have more or less spent its load about Michelle Thomson for now. Having spent most of last week clutching at ever-more-tenuous straws to keep the story alive, it finally petered out over the weekend with a particularly desperate stab at reporting the SNP to the Electoral Commission over claims it worked too closely with Business For Scotland during the referendum campaign.

Triggered by a demented Nat-hating pet-shop manager who may be familiar to social media users for his overpowering obsession with both BFS and this site, it’s based on recent allegations from the Sunday Herald that SNP chief executive (and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband) Peter Murrell had expressed some opinions to BFS over their management, which have now been frantically spun up into a claim that the SNP and BFS were “co-operating” in the campaign.

This could in theory be the Electoral Commission’s business because there were rules governing spending limits which applied if two or more registered participants worked together. Scottish Labour have described the allegations as “hugely serious”, which cynical readers may feel is as good an indicator as any that they’re total horse parts.

The Electoral Commission appears to agree, telling the Herald that it “did not believe the revelations warranted an investigation”, but is obliged to look into the complaint anyway. We may be able to save them some time.

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It’s a pretty desperate day for news in the Sunday papers. The Sunday Herald has a rather overplayed piece on the already-tepid T In The Park “scandal” for its front page, while Scotland on Sunday falls back on its standard last-resort panic move of getting Gordon Wilson – who last led the SNP more than TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO – to blather on about something or other.

In the Observer, Kevin McKenna (who seems to be experiencing voter’s remorse over switching to the Nats in May after a lifetime backing Labour) appears to have written the exact same column as last week – a vague and woolly “SNP bad, Labour fightback starts here” spacefiller –  and the Mail On Sunday digs up the ever-reliable boss of the CBI to warn that the sky will fall in if the SNP does anything ever.

Over on the Sunday Times they’re really scraping the barrel in a desperate attempt to somehow flog yet another week out of the Michelle Thomson story, prominently (and entirely gratuitously) mentioning the MP in a piece about an allegedly-dodgy house sale which she has not even the slightest sliver of any sort of connection to.

But it was something else in the same paper that caught our eye.

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Because this isn’t the fairer, better, equal Scotland we’re fighting for.

See you tomorrow, readers.

Much has been made this week of the Scottish Government’s decision to award a water services contract for council buildings, schools, prisons and some other public facilities to an English company (Anglian Water) over the bid by Business Stream, a wholly-owned subsidiary of publicly-owned Scottish Water.

Opponents of the SNP have claimed that the awarding of this contract means that the Scottish Government has somehow privatised the provision of water in Scotland.

Readers may not be completely astonished to learn it’s not true.

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Kezia Dugdale made a spectacle of herself again at First Minister’s Questions earlier today. Using time intended for holding the Scottish Government to account over its devolved responsibilities, Dugdale once more decided instead to ignore her duty to the people of Scotland and attack the FM over a matter which is entirely outwith the Scottish Government’s control, namely the past actions of a Westminster MP.

Pausing only to demand that Holyrood interfere in the running of the independent Law Society, Dugdale then abandoned her casual endangerment of a live police inquiry by focusing instead on the morality of the aforementioned MP’s business practices:

But Ms Dugdale’s own ethics left a few things to be desired.

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As life’s cruel weight bears increasingly down on your weary and creaking shoulders, readers – and it will, if it hasn’t already – you may find that you become decreasingly tolerant of those who waste your remaining time on Earth.

Certainly, this editor has rather less patience than he did in his youth, and engaged in a debate is often seen attempting to short-cut people’s outpourings of heartfelt rhetoric and hurry them along to their point, pleading “Yes, yes, all those awful things are awful but what is it you want to be actually done? What is your list of demands?”

It’s a phrase we’ve found in our minds a lot recently.

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Earlier today we made an observation about the overblown way the media has been covering the Scottish Government’s underspend of 1.3% of its budget (a figure about which the David Hume Institute today cooed approvingly “Even Mr Micawber could not budget more accurately”).

To nobody’s great amazement, Scottish Labour rentahonk Jackie Baillie – fresh from making a complete idiot of herself over the Michelle Thomson case – couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon.

Quite aside from the fact that it means no such thing – there’s no less money, it’s just that some of it will now be carried over and spent this year instead – we suppose the tweet does at least mean that Scottish Labour’s policy position is clear: the Scottish Government should always spend every penny of its budget. Right?

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