Wings Over Scotland

We were greatly amused to learn this morning that Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University, the bad-tempered darling of the Scottish Conservatives and the only political pundit who can make Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph seem measured and thoughtful, plans to stand for election to the Scottish Parliament next May.

We suspect he’ll succeed, too. It now seems plain that Ruth Davidson’s move earlier this month from the Glasgow list to the Lothian one was a ploy to get Prof. Tomkins to the top of the former, and while a Tory list seat in Glasgow is by no means a certainty next year, it’s more likely than not.

(We’ll be somewhat startled if the irritable English academic finds the courage to even try contesting a constituency in Scotland’s largest city. It’s moderately possible that his abrasive hectoring of Scottish voters’ stupidity in continuing to elect the SNP might not go down too well in the council schemes of Easterhouse and Drumchapel.)

Trying to pick out the funniest line in the announcement is no easy task.

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Then:

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Yesterday we noted an interesting apparent shift in the BBC’s political stance with regard to Scotland. Two serving senior political reporters have made open attacks on the SNP, backed up by other media and politicians, seemingly abandoning all notions of the impartiality to which the BBC is bound by charter.

(The Guardian’s hostile editorial was particularly bizarre, suggesting that devolving control of broadcasting in Scotland to Holyrood would turn the BBC into a mouthpiece of government, which inescapably suggests that the current Westminster-controlled BBC is a tool of either Labour or the Tories, depending which one is in power.)

This morning’s edition of The Times is the latest to join the offensive.

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This is quite an extraordinary thing to have happened.

But it’s not the only one.

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Particularly alert readers may recall that we recently made a simple and seemingly innocuous Freedom Of Information request for the latest viewing/listening figures of two BBC Scotland politics programmes (Scotland 2015 and Good Morning Scotland), which was met with the standard BBC “get lost” response to any uppity licence-fee payer with the temerity to ask about how their money’s being spent.

We appealed to the Information Commissioner, and we’ve just received a prompt, and impressively detailed and specific, reply. We attach it below for your enlightenment.

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For reasons best known to himself, and almost certainly NOT related to the recent publication of his new book, the BBC’s Nick Robinson has today chosen to reignite the issues surrounding his infamous questioning of Alex Salmond a week before last year’s independence referendum, claiming that the reaction to his presentation of the incident was reminiscent of “Putin’s Russia”.

The state broadcaster’s political correspondent then inflamed social media further by claiming on Twitter that a grassroots protest – neither instigated nor endorsed by the SNP or Yes Scotland – outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow a couple of days later was in fact organised by “a governing party”.

(Robinson also claimed the mob had been 4000-strong, although the BBC’s own report had put the figure at “up to 1000”. The demo was sedate and entirely peaceful – no arrests were made, nobody was hurt and no damage was caused.)

The footage showing that Robinson had lied on air about his encounter with Salmond was captured and published by this website, in a pair of videos which garnered well over 600,000 views on YouTube and one of the most-read posts in Wings history.

When we mentioned that fact earlier today, a reader asked what other posts were in the top 10. So we looked, and noticed that the biggest ones had a common theme.

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Social media is alive today with tales of people being refused a vote in the Labour leadership election on the grounds that they don’t support Labour values (if anyone even knows what those are any more). We suspect you’ll be hearing quite a bit about it in the press over the coming days.

The prevailing reaction seems to be slack-jawed astonishment at the planetary-scale car-crash the party has allowed to develop around the issue, with another “coup” story thrown in for good measure in the Telegraph.

We can only think of one way the farce could become even worse.

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Here’s John “there will be no referendum” McTernan in today’s Guardian:

So there’s definitely going to be a second referendum, the No campaign is going to win it again and a shattered SNP will collapse as a result, sending Labour triumphantly back to Holyrood power. (Having now come out on top in not one but two internal elections, presumably Kezia Dugdale is now also a “proven winner”.)

It’s just that we feel like we’ve heard that before somewhere.

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An update, then: as we write, our anti-poverty fundraiser (which set out to gather just £500 for a young woman in Kidderminster fined almost £330 for stealing a 75p pack of Mars bars out of desperate hunger after her benefits were sanctioned) stands at a phenomenal £14,395.

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Face, meet palm.

This spoon-faced howler was pointed out mirthfully by vile cybernats days ago, but we suspect that the person at Scottish Labour who knows how to work the internets only comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s going to be a long road back.

Earlier today Gordon Brown gave a speech in London, on a subject and for reasons which are unclear. It was widely trailed in the press, however, as an intervention in the Labour leadership campaign, with the particular goal of stopping Jeremy Corbyn from winning. It was – naturally – broadcast live and in full by the BBC News channel.

Corbyn wasn’t mentioned by name so far as we noticed, but to tell the truth we drifted in and out of the rambling, 49-minute, 30-page monologue full of celebrity namedrops and unconnected anecdotes, hypnotised as we were by Brown’s relentless pacing up and down the room like a caged animal.

Nobody who isn’t getting paid should have to endure the entire grimness of it, so using the magic of technology we’ve compressed it all down to a mere fraction of its length (just 20%) for you, but without losing any of the tone, content or intellectual nuance.

We offer it to you as an elegy. It marks the day that Labour reanimated the walking corpse of the only person left in the party that it considers to have any gravitas – not to win an election, but to try to crush the first man in living memory to enthuse tens of thousands of new members to join a political party in the hope of restoring the values it was created to uphold.

It is the day the soul of the Labour Party finally died.

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Here’s former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris in today’s Sunday Times:

“The toughest job for an opposition leader is to get people’s attention and Kez will make a good job of that. She is different from what you’d normally expect.

But the only thing that would make people give Labour a second glance at the moment is offering something that I am absolutely opposed to, and that is independence. The only way we can attract voters back is by offering them what they want and that is independence.”

Wait, what now?

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