Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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?

Read the rest of this entry →

Older readers may remember an ITV show called The Krypton Factor, which had an “observation round” section in which contestants were shown a short video clip and then asked a series of questions about it.

Let’s play it now.

Read the rest of this entry →

From today’s Herald:

Mmm, that’s positive.

The ever-delightful Taxpayers’ Alliance, speaking at the Conservative conference:

We’re not sure about that last line, chaps.

The newspaper is a fantastic concept. A cheap, accessible product, it’s a brilliant way of keeping yourself broadly abreast of current affairs. You turn a page and are presented with a diverse selection of interesting stories, often on subjects you’d never have thought to go and seek out in the self-refining echo chamber of the internet.

(Theoretically links on websites serve the same purpose, but dodging “sponsored” advertorial, gutter-level clickbait, pop-ups, autoplay video and pages that judder and leap around so much while loading all this rubbish that you’re about 50/50 to have an epileptic fit before you can read the story, has made clicking on one into a game of Russian Roulette fewer and fewer people are willing to take a chance on.)

This site has never believed that the ongoing steep decline in newspaper sales is a fundamental problem with the format. Rather, the truth is that people stop buying papers because they’re full of garbage.

Read the rest of this entry →

You might have thought that the publication of the “Project Fear” book last month was an embarrassment for the motley collection of highly-paid but hapless Labour and Tory apparatchiks who ran “Better Together”, but it turns out there was worse to come.

Politics Home today reports what sounds like some alarming news:

“Pro-EU campaigners in Better Together talks

Informal discussions have taken place with Blair McDougall, who was campaign director of the cross-party body which successfully defeated the Scottish separatists.”

But put down that noose and cough up those pills, Europe-lovers.

Read the rest of this entry →