Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.
Here’s what we’ve got so far.
As the Scottish media winds itself up to full speed with “SNP BAD” columns about the Forth Road Bridge closure, an alert reader spotted an interesting old quote in Hansard featuring a gentleman you may recognise.
We invite anyone who may perhaps just be arriving at work after an unusually long commute this morning to imagine a Scotland where Mr Darling had been listened to, and the prospect of a replacement crossing was still several years away.
On the left, the Conservatives’ 2015 general election manifesto.
On the right, yesterday’s Press & Journal. We wish we could even fake surprise.
At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale oddly chose to spend her entire allotted time not on any current issues affecting Scotland, but on attacking the SNP’s 2013 White Paper on independence, seemingly unaware that the referendum was held 14 months ago and resulted in a win for the No side.
Happily for Scotland, that decision resulted in a huge £200bn oil bonanza.
Hang on, let’s just double-check that to be sure.
Ah, the good old days.
Obviously, actually including the exact phrases “within 45 minutes” and “weapons of mass destruction” might have been a little bit too near the knuckle, but the message comes across just the same: “Here we go again.”
So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.
It got a bit out of control, frankly.
There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:
Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.
It’s a pretty desperate day for news in the Sunday papers. The Sunday Herald has a rather overplayed piece on the already-tepid T In The Park “scandal” for its front page, while Scotland on Sunday falls back on its standard last-resort panic move of getting Gordon Wilson – who last led the SNP more than TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO – to blather on about something or other.
In the Observer, Kevin McKenna (who seems to be experiencing voter’s remorse over switching to the Nats in May after a lifetime backing Labour) appears to have written the exact same column as last week – a vague and woolly “SNP bad, Labour fightback starts here” spacefiller – and the Mail On Sunday digs up the ever-reliable boss of the CBI to warn that the sky will fall in if the SNP does anything ever.
Over on the Sunday Times they’re really scraping the barrel in a desperate attempt to somehow flog yet another week out of the Michelle Thomson story, prominently (and entirely gratuitously) mentioning the MP in a piece about an allegedly-dodgy house sale which she has not even the slightest sliver of any sort of connection to.
But it was something else in the same paper that caught our eye.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
