Wings Over Scotland

On the day of the march and rally for independence in Edinburgh last month, the BBC’s coverage was token to the point of openly contemptuous. As 20,000 people marched through the nation’s capital to hear the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and others speak in public, the state broadcaster grudgingly provided a few seconds of footage of the march on Reporting Scotland, and then bizarrely gave equal airtime to the “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall and a suspiciously staged-looking leafleting of four or five people by the No camp.

It struck us as weird at the time, and the episode of Reporting Scotland in question curiously never found its way onto the iPlayer, unlike every other one.

And then tonight it happened again.

Read the rest of this entry →

Experienced readers will know that it’s a rare and special day when the BBC deigns to open up a Scottish story on its website to reader comments.

The results are invariably to be cherished, as our friends elsewhere in the UK share their considered, informed and thoughtful views on why we’re all better together.

Read the rest of this entry →

We forget who, but someone we read this week – in the Herald, we think – referenced a line spoken by Jennifer Aniston’s character in an old episode of Friends (which we’ve managed to identify as S02E01, “The One With Ross’s New Girlfriend”):

“When I saw him get off that plane with her, I really thought I just hit rock bottom. But today, it’s like there’s rock bottom, then 50 feet of crap, then me.”

We were put in mind of it by something in this afternoon’s Guardian.

Read the rest of this entry →

We haven’t had one in this series for a wee while, have we?

That’s Labour’s shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Margaret Curran, accusing the First Minister of “misleading” Scots by suggesting she wants to scrap the Barnett Formula. The only possible implication can be that she doesn’t want such a thing.

Let us help refresh your memory, Margaret.

Read the rest of this entry →

The sun rarely shines on the council estates of Maryhill. But on the rare occasions when it does, they emerge, dragging their Argos Value deckchairs behind them.

The high-rise flats do their best to block the light, but they find a spot in the concrete playground where the sun peeks through. They plant their chairs, flap open their Daily Records, crack open their cans and bask in the thin angle of the sunlight.

Read the rest of this entry →

The following stories all come from a single day’s edition of a single British newspaper – the Independent’s issue dated 16 October 2013. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alistair Darling is in full Private Frazer mode over on the “Better Together” website today with his campaign’s latest variant on the timeless “too wee, too poor, too stupid” theme. Allow us to save you some time by stripping the entire 1000-word rant down to its three core paragraphs:

“Scotland has run a net fiscal deficit in 20 of the past 21 years. This suggests that over this period North Sea Oil receipts would have been required to fund public services in Scotland rather than being invested in an oil fund.

Faced with the fact that Scotland’s oil taxes are needed to fund Scotland’s public services, John Swinney made a decision that alter the terms of the independence debate forever. He made it clear on Good Morning Scotland that he favoured borrowing money to pay into an oil fund.

Borrowing to save is such a daft idea that it leads you back to the conclusion that to set up an oil fund they would have little choice but to raise taxes or cut spending. “

Contained within those few short lines is so much misinformation that it’s going to take rather longer to pull it all apart and see what the former Chancellor is trying to conceal, so let’s get straight to it. We don’t even have time for a picture.

Read the rest of this entry →

Because frankly we could write 10,000 words and not say as much about the state of the United Kingdom in 2013 – and its future – as these two pictures do.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alert readers will have noticed that the mainstream press has been rummaging through its Greatest Nat-Bashing Hits again over recent days, trying to flog one last turn around the track out of the year-old “EU advice” story. The Herald, Telegraph, Express and others have all dredged it up again to excoriate the Scottish Government for “wasting” just over £19,000 (or in newspaper arithmetic, “£20,000”) trying to uphold the principle of law officers being able to give advice in confidentiality.

But wait a minute – when this story first did the rounds, wasn’t it a lot more?

Read the rest of this entry →

This is the front page lead story from today’s Sunday Post:

There’s a curious line there. Can you spot it?

Read the rest of this entry →

We must confess, we’ve never quite understood the No campaign’s longing to turn the independence referendum into one on Alex Salmond. The First Minister certainly divides opinion, but his personal ratings are consistently more impressive (and by a considerable distance) than poll figures for Yes.

The latest one we could find (from a month ago) suggests that if the referendum question was “Do you want to entrust Scotland’s future to Alex Salmond?”, the Yes side would win by an 11% margin on an 85% turnout.

So it makes stuff like this, from today’s Sunday Herald, all the more puzzling.

Read the rest of this entry →

From another ridiculous, barrel-scraping right-wing tabloid piece today:

“Another song pays tribute to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, while All Jock Tamson’s Bairns are Coming Home, by Steven Clark, welcomes refugees from “Iraq, Zimbabwe, Turkey and Somalia”.

Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman Mary Scanlon said: ‘The SNP is abusing the education system to promote its own separation propaganda.'”

Welcoming refugees from all corners of the globe, while simultaneously promoting “separatism”? Is it just us, or is there maybe a wee bit of a logical contradiction there?

The stench of panic from the No camp is getting overwhelming.