Wings Over Scotland

One of the main reasons we started Wings Over Scotland 15 months ago was a recurring frustration at the Scottish media’s constant failure to represent our views. Time after time we’d sit watching the TV with our blood pressure rising, shouting “Why aren’t you asking this CLEARLY lying idiot the staggeringly bloody obvious question that anyone with a IQ higher than a badger’s bawbag would be asking?” at the screen until the neighbours started banging on the wall again.

We’ve come a long way in 15 months, and we can at least now draw a sizeable audience’s attention to such unasked questions. But the phenomenon hasn’t lessened any, and last night’s Newsnight Scotland provided a textbook example.

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It’s commonplace for professional journalists these days to dismiss bloggers and social-media users as “internet bampots” – frothing, furious, abusive lunatics ranting at parked cars. But in fairness, some do tend to get a bit over-excited from time to time.

By way of example, let’s check out a couple of the wilder-eyed nationalists who’ve been allowed out by the nurses to air their rage in public this week.

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Readers may recall that a few days ago we highlighted a rather bizarre confusion on the part of the anti-independence movement, which is more commonly known as “Better Whenever” or something like that. Faced with a poll in which 11% of respondents wished to completely abolish the Scottish Parliament and end the devolution experiment, the No campaign decided that such people were in fact “supporters of devolution” and tailored their promotional materials accordingly.

We think we may have solved this baffling puzzle, however, and the key was in a Twitter message posted earlier today by the campaign’s director Blair McDougall.

Unaccountably, Mr McDougall appeared to be under the impression than the SNP had “opposed” devolution in the 1990s. (And presumbly most pertinently around the time of the 1997 referendum on the subject.) That didn’t quite seem to square with our, in fairness, increasingly-fallible memory of the period, so we did a little research.

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Poor old “Better Together”. We already knew they had some difficulty with basic counting, but today it seems their reading isn’t up to much either. Desperate to deflect attention from the hideous hole they’ve dug themselves into over Europe, they’ve seized on the latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing (depending how you spin it) almost three-quarters of Scots in favour of devolution rather than independence.

There’s only one problem: the cited source for those figures doesn’t say that at all.

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Cue six months of Jim Murphy droning on about the “Arc Of Inflammability”.

Bunnet-doff to alert reader Ray McRobbie.

There was an interesting article in today’s Herald entitled “SNP snub plan for more tax powers at Holyrood”. It centred around the latest report from the Institute of Public Policy Research, advocating a new form of further devolution settlement (dubbed “Devo More”) as a solution to Scotland’s problems rather than for independence.

The article itself was devoid of any analysis of the report’s findings, though in fairness to the Herald it did note that the IPPR “has close ties to Labour”, thereby alerting suspicious readers to potential bias within the document.

As far as many independence supporters are concerned, any offer of further devolution at this point is merely an empty promise of “jam tomorrow”. Had any Westminster party seriously intended to increase the level of devolution to Scotland, runs their argument, then they could have done so during the Calman Commission, the Scotland Act or more recently by including an offer of further devolution on the ballot paper for the 2014 independence referendum. They did none of these things.

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A picture’s been doing the rounds on the nationalist social networks today, to a mixture of merriment and a nagging sense of injustice. It’s a retraction by the Herald of some wildly-inaccurate figures it published a couple of weeks ago about the alleged threat posed by independence to jobs at Faslane Naval Base, which we highlighted at the time. Here’s the picture. (Click for the full-size version.)

As we say, some pro-independence types have been gloating at the Herald having to apologise at all, while others have bemoaned the correction being buried in a corner of an obscure inside page when the original was a front-page lead story. But there’s something much more worrying about it than that.

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Readers may well recall some very recent analysis we undertook on the Scottish Government’s investment in promoting Scotland abroad, and the huge returns it generated in jobs and tourism. They may also remember that the opposition parties in Holyrood, led by Labour, were incandescent with rage at the “waste” of around £500,000 of taxpayers’ money spent on sending government delegations numbering dozens of people to the USA to undertake the work.

Given the recent revelations that almost half as large a sum – £232,708 – was unnecessarily awarded by Glasgow Labour councillors to a Labour crony who formerly headed a charitable body (over and above a severance pay-off which was already mind-bogglingly generous at £240,000), we wonder if anyone could help us with some info on how many tens of millions of pounds and/or hundreds of jobs the Labour-run council’s expenditure has delivered to Scotland? We can’t seem to find anything.

Readers will recall that earlier this week we heartily recommended a fantastic article written by Irvine Welsh for Bella Caledonia. Talking of the “Trainspotting” author’s happy times living with family in England and discussing how Scottish independence could enhance British cultural unity, it was an enormously positive piece which was widely acclaimed and warmly received pretty much everywhere.

Scotland on Sunday saw it through rather different eyes. Ignoring the uplifting message of friendship entirely, it grasped on a couple of isolated lines (so to speak) from the 5000-word essay and used it as an excuse to run a story headlined “Irvine Welsh says young people better off dealing drugs than studying for meaningless degree”.

After being on the website for just a couple of hours (at time of writing we can’t confirm if it was in the print paper), the piece mysteriously vanished, not even being visible in Google Cache. But an alert Wings Over Scotland reader was on the cut-and-paste case. If you want to see SoS’s twisted interpretation of Welsh’s words, they’re below.

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February 2012: “Don’t worry, Scotland – the Olympics might be costing you millions of pounds, but look at all the extra tourism you’ll be getting from it to compensate!”

What could possibly go wrong? Bring on the bonanza!

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Oh dear, BBC.

That’s a very poor effort at impartiality indeed.