The comfort of lies 197
Posted on
June 09, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Archive for the ‘comment’
Jail time for Joanne 306
Posted on
June 08, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This site is not terribly inclined towards sympathy for popular children’s author Joanne Kathleen Rowling. We’re still waiting on an apology for her donating a crucial million pounds towards ensuring Scotland stayed ruled by Tories and got dragged out of the EU against its will, on the bonkers premise that voting No would magically put Scots in a position of unprecedented popularity and power within the UK.
As a smart piece of analysis it’s right up there with “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”, and it would have been nice if at some point in the last six years she’d held her hands up and gone “Y’know what, I called that one really badly wrong. Sorry about the whole Tory/Brexit thing, everyone. We all make mistakes”.
(Wings, of course, got it exactly right at the time.)
We still don’t think she deserves seven years in prison, though.
A minor confusion 463
Posted on
June 03, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Oh no, someone’s let Ian Murray say words again.
There’s only one small problem with that complaint.
The test case 191
Posted on
May 29, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Some in the independence movement got quite excited yesterday about a widely-reported poll showing that 63% of Scots want a new indyref in the next five years. It reminded us that we’d had a question on the subject in our own Panelbase poll earlier this month that we hadn’t got around to talking about.
Because of what we wanted to find out, that question was asked in a slightly strange way, so let’s quickly explain.
Of no materiality 351
Posted on
May 27, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’ve just learned that we’ve lost the appeal over our defamation by the then-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, when she repeatedly and publicly made the appalling, damaging and wholly untrue smear that I was a homophobe, even though the appeal judges all agreed with the original sheriff that the smear was false and defamatory.
But when it comes to deciding the verdict in a defamation case, it seems that the fact that absolutely everyone agrees I was definitely defamed is, to borrow a phrase from later in the judgement,“of no materiality”.
Another problem solved 454
Posted on
May 21, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
When the news isn’t news:
Lots of Scottish newspapers (most notably everything in the Herald And Times Group) had already ducked out of providing ABC figures at all, but this will be a godsend for the rest to save their growing embarrassment.
Wings readers can remember the pitiful state of the last published figures here.
In the hands of others 121
Posted on
May 20, 2020 by
Chris McEleny
On the 1st of January, Chinese authorities took the decision to close the Wuhan food market. The following day, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, were confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus) which we now know as COVID-19.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a New Year message, from the private island of Mustique in the Caribbean, that the “first item” on his agenda remained his commitment to take Britain out of the EU by the end of January.
Within weeks the virus had spread across the world to many countries including Italy, Germany, Australia, the USA and of course the UK.
A bit of spot colour 141
Posted on
May 19, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.
Which is just two months after this happened:
So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.
Image adjustment 142
Posted on
May 15, 2020 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We lost a few quid to Graham Linehan at poker this afternoon and we needed a wee bit of cheering up, so God bless the SNP Twitler Youth for coming to our rescue.
Okay, now we’re worried.
