Because some of you won’t have seen it yet. This is NOT a spoof.
That’s what they think will persuade people to vote No, readers.
Labour’s Douglas Alexander got himself in a right old pickle this weekend, at first claiming that the party’s new campaign around a poster about VAT referred to an annual bill of £450 for the average family, but then trying to backtrack in a panic and claim the sum was calculated over the entire period of the coalition government when it was pointed out to him that the figure was ludicrous.
Wings Over Scotland is of course dedicated above all to keeping the record straight, so our sinister network of shadowy cyber-agents got straight onto the case.
The Scotsman, 24 March 2007:
How (some) things change, eh readers?
This morning’s Daily Mail reports that Alistair Darling has been “sidelined” by the No campaign, with Douglas Alexander drafted into his place. We’ve remarked previously on this site about our bemusement over the reverence with which Mr Alexander’s intellect is regarded by the Scottish media, and we’re none the wiser after this:
The deeply dodgy fake-grassroots “Vote No Borders” group of wealthy London-based PR people has been rolling out its “unpolished” voters (their term, not ours) again, this time in a series of what must have been fairly pricey adverts in the Daily Record.
The simplistic, often dreadfully-misinformed quotes in the ads have been causing some irritation and anger among Yes supporters on social media, which is understandable but not constructive. After all, many of us have relied on the press for our information about one thing or another in the past too, and learned a bitter lesson.
So let’s see if we can’t actually be polite and helpful instead.
It’s been fascinating to watch the media slyly turning Chris and Colin Weir’s quite understandable objection to being defamed by loathsome right-wing newspapers and MSPs into an attack on “cybernats”.
But this morning Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph – who we rarely read even for laughs now, so far gone is his grasp on reality – added a particularly deft twist which we thought worthy of note for those who like to study how the press does its business.
And yes, we entirely meant that double entendre.
Alert readers will have noticed that we’ve been studying the UK government’s latest independence paper today. The 24-page booklet comes with a foreword from the Secretary of State for Portsmouth promising that it contains “the positive case for Scotland remaining in the United Kingdom”, so we thought it’d be fun to share some of our favourite snippets of positivity.
We could do with some cheering up.
The Scotland Office has today released yet another taxpayer-funded (though we’re not allowed to know how much) document about how rubbish and useless Scotland is. Issued in the name of Alistair Carmichael, it reheats and repeats all the same lines from the previous papers, but this time dumbed down a bit for thickos.
You’d think that having been churning out the same thing for two years, the UK government would have at least managed to get its story straight by now.
There doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of coverage of Ed Miliband’s visit to Scotland today, presumably because there’s so little to report. The Labour leader came to Dundee and promised to commit to implementing the party’s feeble and essentially meaningless “Devo Nano” proposals – something that both he and Johann Lamont had already done in interviews at the time of the Scottish Labour conference in March – and also reiterated a few UK-wide policies.
So the BBC, perhaps aware of the low levels of newsworthiness in the visit and plainly keen to avoid having to report any more significant developments in the independence debate, decided to sex things up a bit for him.
We can do this in one picture, folks. Remember barely a fortnight ago, when the Tories were wailing about how there wasn’t enough immigration into Scotland to sustain its economy in the coming decades? Here’s a little snippet of data from a Survation poll for the Daily Mirror earlier this week.
Well, there’s a dilemma, eh? Scotland need more immigrants, but the rest of the UK is absolutely desperate to have fewer – so much so that it’s 67% more important than the cost of living, twice as important as the state of the economy, over three times as important as unemployment or debt, and FIVE times as important as the NHS.
Immigration policy is reserved to Westminster. Which way do you see that going?
Owen Jones in the Guardian, 8 May 2014:
A real revolution to rally behind there, eh viewers?
We’ve never met Chris and Colin Weir, but judging by their actions alone, they’re the sort of people we should all aspire to be more like. Caring, decent and hard-working people all their lives, fate bestowed a great slice of fortune on them when they won £161m on the EuroMillions lottery in 2011.
Unlike others, they didn’t embark on an orgy of ostentatious consumption, decadence and waste. Shunning publicity, they enjoyed their windfall but also quietly got on with doing untold good for their local community, helping out their friends and family and neighbours. It’s doubtful we’ll ever know the full extent of their generosity. They’ve never sought recognition or thanks for the millions they’ve given away.
But at the very least, as a bare-minimum standard of humanity, they deserve better than to be traduced in the press by sewer-dwelling vermin like this:
The worthless fat trougher above is Alex Johnstone, a staunch defender of the bedroom tax who’s never managed to actually win an election in his own right but is nevertheless the Tory list MSP for North East Scotland, sponging off the taxpayer in the name of a democratic proportional representation that his party doggedly refuses to extend to the rest of the UK.
And what he did today is going to be the biggest test of our self-restraint in the 30 months since we started this website.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
