We got blocked by LBC’s James O’Brien today for very gently and politely challenging him over this tweet:
And while this site most assuredly carries no torch for Jeremy Corbyn, it’s a reframing of reality that merits a bit of investigation for what it tells us about the UK media.
Two stories from yesterday’s Scottish papers, published at 11.19am and 11.28am:
But it’s even weirder than it looks.
Scottish Labour would like you to meet Rory.
They want you to believe that he was an SNP member and independence voter who’s recently changed his mind and become a devolutionist Labour supporter.
But that’s not quite true.
As the mandate for a second independence referendum currently sits gathering dust in the SNP vaults, discussion has started on ways to generate some movement. One of these has been the possibility of a Wings political party being set up to campaign for Holyrood list seats, which has generated rather a lot of attention.
Various pundits have been loudly vocal about the perceived pros and cons, but I’ve been extremely dissatisfied – in particular with those dismissing the value of a Wings party – with the quality of evidence and analysis that they’ve produced to justify their negative opinion. So I thought I’d use my day-job skills in commercial data science to analyse and understand the benefits, or otherwise, of the idea.
Oh dear God in Heaven, not THIS again.
Helen Thompson is apparently the “Professor of Political Economy” at Cambridge University. No wonder the country is being run by imbeciles.
Let’s speak really slowly and see if the idiots can get it into their thick heads this time.
So, there’s been quite a response to our interview in today’s Times.
The interview was an interesting one in itself that we might talk more about later this weekend, but let’s leave that aside for now and talk about the headline take, because as usual the Scottish media is presenting it in a remarkably dishonest manner.
The Daily Record today carries a piece by Scottish Labour MPs Ian Murray and Martin Whitfield (no, us either) bitterly attacking their leadership over the Euro election results.
The two men complain that Jeremy Corbyn and Richard Leonard won’t listen to them, and insist that the party must “heed the people” if it ever wants to wield power again.
So it’s a bit ironic that they won’t take their own advice.
We’ve watched in growing amazement this morning as some Remain supporters have tried to spin last night’s election results as somehow representing a Remain victory. Much of it has been based on this batshit-mad graphic from the BBC website:
We’ll give you a moment to digest that one.
Ruth Davidson led on numeracy (or as Tories call it, “numberacy”) at FMQs today.
And we can see why she’s concerned.
This was the Secretary of State for Scotland on the BBC’s coverage of the Scottish Conservative conference earlier today.
The broadcaster’s political editor Brian Taylor gets uncharacteristically indignant with Mundell’s response, and well he might.
Billions of years from now, when the Sun finally dies and expands to swallow and burn up the Earth in a final cataclysmic explosion, the very last thing to turn to dust and atoms will be Scottish Labour’s brass neck.
Coming from The Eternal Abstainers themselves that’s already quite a breathtakingly hypocritical claim, but if you look at last night’s results closely it gets a lot worse.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Politics is weird. The government is inventing and distributing huge, unprecedented sums of money out of thin air, but is doing it in the most idiotically inefficient, bureaucratic way imaginable because politics.
I wonder what went on in Channel 4's heads when they thought "let's schedule Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares after Frasier every day"?
I was right to be suspicious. Turns out the exact number of new ventilators we can expect this weekend is 30. That’s right 30. Not 3,000 or even 300. But 30. Mr Gove’s exact words Tuesday were “the first of thousands of new ventilator devices will roll off the production line”. https://t.co/PNGehH2CYk
Wings Over Scotland
