We’re sure, right?
And it’ll be accompanied, we haven’t even the slightest shred of doubt, by a veritable procession of outraged columnists demanding that Alistair Darling must take personal responsibility for the actions of these people.
There’s a remarkable story on the BBC website today. Torn between the referendum campaign and the 2015 UK election campaign, Labour’s health spokesman Andy Burnham has finally admitted in public that yes, NHS England IS being privatised.
But it’s what he wants done about it that made us double-take.
We were in quite a cheerful mood last night. The “indy cyclist” Mark Coburn had just achieved the goal on his latest fundraiser for various Yes groups, which meant that any extra money raised between now and the end of the project next Friday would go to the Maryhill Food Bank run by Julie Webster, which we featured last weekend.
And then we read a story from yesterday’s Scottish Sun.
In today’s Scottish Sun:
There’s nothing worse for a parent than your children seeing people as foreigners. We’re sure that Ed’s Belgian father and Polish mother would agree.
Most newspapers have a story today about the resignation of Labour parliamentary candidate Kathy Wiles after her long history of abusive and offensive comments on social media was exposed on this site on Monday and Tuesday.
The BBC, STV, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record, Express, Times, Courier and most others all report the story to varying degrees of accuracy, and most of the pieces are all but identical, featuring the same quotes. (Only the Telegraph declines to mention it, perhaps out of embarrassment over this unfortunately-timed, one-sided Alan Cochrane rant about “cybernats” on the same day Ms Wiles caught everyone’s attention.)
As the local paper of the would-be MP for Angus the Courier’s coverage is the best, with not only the standard resignation story but also a slightly deeper delve into her lengthy record of nasty postings and an editorial leader column, which is the only place we’ve seen raise the more important question arising from the incident.
Every rock that we look under near Labour’s newest Westminster candidate Kathy Wiles – who thinks that 7-year-olds taking part in a peaceful Yes protest are akin to the Hitler Youth, and that “most” SNP voters are benefit scroungers – sees lots more nasty little cockroaches skittering out and running from the sudden influx of light.
But despite setting a high bar with the comments above, Ms Wiles keeps clearing it.
So, this afternoon’s big story is that the son of Holocaust refugees (campaigning on the same side as Holocaust deniers), is threatening to put a whole race of people in a ghetto by building a barbed-wire fence and guard posts across their only land border?
Have we got that right?
We spent much of yesterday evening trying to actually track down the “vicious barrage” of vile cybernat abuse that Labour and “Better Together” activist Clare Lally says she was subjected to after being revealed to be rather less of an “ordinary” member of the public than the No camp presented her as at its recent Glasgow rally, and which has received wall-to-wall media coverage.
As yet, we’ve drawn a blank. We’ve made repeated requests, some to people who’ve contacted us angrily claiming to be her friends or family members, for evidence of any abusive comments at all. All have been met with an abrupt outbreak of silence.
Scotland 2014 devoted almost its entire 30-minute show to the issue last night. To depict the terrible onslaught, the above tweets were all they could come up with. The entire affair, readers might feel, is starting to smell distinctly piscine.
Just for laughs, we thought we’d have a look on the BBC website this morning for some intelligent, detailed analysis of yesterday’s devolution proposals from the Conservatives. Yeah, we know. We must still be a bit drunk from last night.
Not only is there not a single mention of the Strathclyde Commission report in the headlines (which do find room to report the line-up of a book festival in Nairn coincidentally featuring a number of BBC presenters, and the hot news that Roy Keane will NOT be the next manager of Celtic, although neither he nor Celtic had ever said he would), but on digging down into the dedicated referendum section we found something more disturbing.
Alert readers may have spotted that the “Vote No Borders” cinema advert featured on this much-viewed Wings article from a few days ago can no longer be played from the campaign group’s YouTube page, returning a “Private” error.
An even more alert reader, however, had already made a copy.
And while the entire series of ads has now been effectively banned by all of Scotland’s cinema chains, all the other ones are still present on the website while the NHS one (described as “a light-hearted sketch”) has vanished. And now we’ve found out why.
According to Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood Magazine, this afternoon Johann Lamont issued a press release bizarrely calling on all supporters of “progressive” politics to unite against the SNP and UKIP. Now, that’s fairly mindboggling in itself in all sorts of ways, but we can’t help wondering whether she ran it past her deputy first.
Because that tweet raises a whole host of questions.
While we admit that it probably doesn’t look like it (because we focus on the failures), this site’s default position with the media is to assume good faith. With the exception of newspapers that have explicitly declared themselves for the Union – the Daily Mail, Express etc – we strain every possible sinew to put errors down to incompetence, laziness or lack of investigative resources rather than malicious attempts to mislead.
We’ve even been known on quite a few occasions to publicly chide overly-paranoid Yes supporters on social media for seeing conspiracies everywhere.
But then sometimes we read things like today’s leader column in the Daily Record on the subject of immigration and we wonder whether they might be right after all.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
