So there was a football match at the weekend.
At least three people were stabbed, one very seriously, in violent incidents the likes of which haven’t been seen around Scottish football for years.
But it was probably just a random, unforseeable one-off, right?
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.
This was the Scottish Tories two years ago, when Scotland’s economy registered a small downturn for a single quarter, which was definitely the SNP’s fault:
Shall we find out what actually happened, readers?
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.
The Foreign Secretary in September 2018:
And after an apparent change of heart in March 2019:
What an absolute Hunt, eh readers?
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.
Lordy, is it that time again already?
Let’s leave aside the most toweringly and obviously cretinous aspect of that insanely illogical claim for a moment – namely, if the McCrone Report was such a smoking gun proving independence would be bad, why did the UK government suppress it for 30 years rather than sending a copy to every home in Scotland and shouting it from the rooftops every single day? – and just quickly look at what it actually said.
In today’s Times:
Yeah, you read it right. He really said it out loud.
Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
