Wings Over Scotland

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.

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Wings Over Scotland isn’t the only website dedicated to scrutinising the truthfulness of things claimed by politicians and media pundits. There’s the widely-respected and diligent FullFact.org, there’s Scotland’s own The Ferret, and there’s the BBC’s Reality Check (which frequently takes the more unconventional approach of, er, not making a finding either way about what the reality of things is).

And then there’s Channel 4’s FactCheck, which we’re going to generously assume had a liquid lunch yesterday and was a little under the weather.

Because not only is the conclusion that it reached on the subject of an independent Scotland having to use the Euro utter nonsense that’s been debunked roughly 1000 times in the last six years, it doesn’t even agree with itself.

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The Scotsman is delighted to have some bad news to report:

So, the number of teachers is falling, right?

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Michael Glackin of the Sunday Times is the only serious contender to the Scotsman’s demented Brian Wilson as the most poisonously, blindly instinctive hater of anything even passingly connected to the SNP or independence in the Scottish media. His weekly bilious rants in the paper make even Scottish Daily Express hacks wince and say “Blimey, that’s a bit strong”.

But even by those standards, this week’s column is quite something. So let’s take a little look at just how much of an idiot you can make of yourself if you never allow facts to get in the way of your rage.

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Watching the Six Nations rugby tournament every year is usually quite a dispiriting experience – not just because of Scotland’s invariably underwhelming performances (broken up by the occasional false dawn), but because talking about it on social media always results in an extremely tedious flood of comments about how rugby is a sport played and watched exclusively by middle-class Tory No voters.

(That’s Scotland skipper Greig Laidlaw there, with Wings mascot Hamish.)

Speaking as someone whose interest in the tournament (in the pre-inflation days when it was the Five Nations) was first sparked when my extremely working-class Bathgate comprehensive school started taking pupils to Murrayfield in the 1980s – 50p for the bus and 50p for the match ticket, which got you a seat on wooden benches actually on the grass – this attitude has always instinctively felt like complete nonsense.

So when we did our latest Panelbase poll during this year’s competition, we figured we may as well actually find out.

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Self-propelling brain vacancy Alex Cole-Hamilton might have just recorded the shortest ever reign at the top of our Thickest Politician In Scotland rankings, but you can’t keep a proper idiot down for long.

It probably goes without saying that none of the above is even a little bit true.

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Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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Unionists have been in a purple frenzy of rage in the last couple of weeks that the First Minister has dared to leave the country not once but twice in order to try to improve relations and trade links with Scotland’s business partners. Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton – a man who still thinks the Queensferry Crossing isn’t finished a year and a half after traffic started using it – tried a different tack.

And that’s a zinger of a point unless oh dear what’s this?

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We had an interesting exchange with Scottish Labour MP Paul Sweeney this week on the deathless lie that is the “fiscal transfer” – the £10bn or so that Unionists rather startlingly insist the rest of the UK generously donates to Scotland every year out of the goodness of its heart, just for the pleasure of our company.

As you can see, the debate was of a high intellectual standard.

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Alert readers will recall that earlier today we conducted one of our regular context checks for statistics misleadingly-incompletely reported in the Scottish press. But while those are like shooting fish in a barrel, there’s one thing that’s an even more reliable open goal for the website editor looking for content in a slow news week.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again we give you… Scottish Labour.

There’s absolutely nothing that happens in Scotland that Scottish Labour are happy with. Day in and day out they can be found putting the bleakest possible spin on any statistic for a dwindling audience of diehard supporters and Scottish journalists.

Something bad happened? SCOTLAND IS TERRIBLE AND IT’S ALL THE SNP’S FAULT. Something good happened? IT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH AND IT’S ALL THE SNP’S FAULT. And the solution is always the same: let Labour run things.

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Earlier on today we reported on a case of a Scottish Labour MP being inadvertently unacquainted with some quite pertinent facts regarding a public pronouncement they’d made. While we’d assumed this to be an isolated incident, it’s in fact our sad duty to report another example within the Northern Branch Office.

That’s the pro-Brexit former Labour minister Tom Harris, there, making just the sort of statement that this site like to fact-check. So let’s see the most recent data.

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STV News gets the new year off to a cheery start today:

The headline, as alert readers will be accustomed to by now, is a flat-out lie. As far as the article reveals – and there’s nothing on the company’s website offering any more detail, nor in the longer quotes we found elsewhere – chartered accountants French Duncan LLP have in fact made no predictions whatsoever as to the number of Scottish insolvencies in 2019, merely recorded the number that took place in 2018.

STV’s claim that the 2018 figure of 12,000 “could be even higher by the end of 2019” appears, then, to have been entirely invented. But the depressing tone – which the Daily Express turns into a full-blown crisis, roping in Murdo Fraser for some SNP BAD rentaguff along the way – is even more inexplicable than simple fabrication.

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