We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.
And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.
We might have to transcribe the whole thing, because it’s remarkable.
But for now here’s just a brief flavour of Willie Rennie on the subject of an independent Scotland’s membership of NATO, from last night’s Newsnight Scotland (from 5m 30s).
Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.
The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.
David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:
If you hate listening to audio or watching video (as opposed to reading the printed word) as much as we do, or if you’re just at work and can’t, here’s a complete transcript – courtesy of one of our splendid readers – of this morning’s BBC Breakfast appearance from UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom.
Once again, the very last line of the transcript is the killer.
You might want to wrap some bandaging around your jaw before listening to this BBC News interview with UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom this morning, to keep it off the floor.
It gets more and more mindboggling as it goes on. But it’s not the chilling thing.
Michael Moore is the Secretary of State for Scotland.
Keep that in mind when you read the next line.
It’s very rare, viewers, that we get so angry in the course of writing a post that we have to stop.
But when we ran a picture last night of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP, opening a foodbank with a cretinous smile on his face as if being a member of the government of a modern industrial nation in need of foodbanks was something to be happy about, a reader suggested making a gallery of similar images.
This is as many as we could bear.
Our old pal Tom Harris fits awfully comfortably into the pages of the Daily Telegraph for a Labour MP representing a poverty-blighted Glasgow seat. But there’s something a bit odd about the ugly little piece on immigration he penned for the paper this week.
See if you can spot it.
Here’s a nice wee feelgood story to end the week, found by one of our covert field agents this afternoon. (Codename “Maw”.) Despite the extreme financial pressures on the British economy, the UK government has managed to stumble across a significant cash windfall – over half a billion pounds, in fact.
We’ll pass you over to the Fife edition of the Courier for the details.
We can’t say we were especially upset late last night when the Scottish Sun revealed that Susan Boyle is anti-independence. We doubt her views, or any celebrity’s, will dramatically shape the electorate’s opinions. All the same, the unseemly haste with which the No camp leapt on the news left an unpleasant taste in our mouths.
And if you’ve ever read a tabloid newspaper or watched ITV News any time in the last four years or so, it shouldn’t be terribly hard to figure out why.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
