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 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.
The Scotsman is delighted to have some bad news to report:
So, the number of teachers is falling, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
