Wings Over Scotland

Vince Cable, who was once apparently some sort of politician, took it upon himself to issue an opinion yesterday on the subject of referendums that had independence supporters on social media hooting with mocking laughter long into the night.

The estimable Wee Ginger Dug has already dealt adroitly with just the 300 or so most obviously ridiculous aspects of Cable’s tone-deaf and spectacularly hypocritical view, so we won’t step on his paws by repeating them here.

Instead we thought we’d do what we do best, and check the facts.

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The Scottish Daily Mail fished this story out of the news toilet today:

So “man with major and important job gets paid the same rate for a full day’s work as Britain’s 800+ Lords and Ladies do for signing in for five minutes and then going home“ is apparently a shock-horror scoop now. But it gets better.

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Last night we stumbled across an interesting little statistical wrinkle to our story from Wednesday about voters’ satisfaction with Scottish public services.

The middle set of figures there is especially revealing.

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While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

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Well, this is odd. An alert reader has sent us the response they just received from the BBC to a question about our recent banning from YouTube, and it’s curious.

“No discretion”, eh? That’s not what they said last week.

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It’s around this time of year that we always enjoy a delve in the impenetrable enigma that is the membership of Scottish Labour. (As gathered together in the picture below during Jeremy Corbyn’s last trip to Edinburgh.)

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Anyone who’s ever written to the BBC, or who follows this site, will already know that the Corporation’s instinctive standard response to any request for information is “Get stuffed, pleb. Just because you pay for us doesn’t mean we’re answerable to you.”

But they do tend to show a little more respect if you used to be the First Minister.

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It’s always nice to see Michelle Mone in the news again, especially when the Tory peer crowbars an attempted intervention into Scottish politics into everything she does.

And since there’s not much else going on, it seemed like a good excuse to have a wee delve into what she’s been up to lately.

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Right, let’s wrap this up and hope some actual politics happens soon. By now readers will presumably be aware of our successful fight against the BBC’s shutting down of our YouTube channel last week. The channel is now fully back in service, including all 13 of the clips the BBC complained about.

But the job’s by no means all done. Technically the restoration is only temporary while the BBC conducts a “review” of its attitude towards copyright of news clips, and Peter “Moridura” Curran’s large YouTube archive remains terminated (although we’re not sure to what extent he’s pursuing its return).

And quite a few questions are still hanging unanswered in the air.

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So this morning, four days after our entire YouTube channel was deleted at the behest of the BBC, and after days of wrestling with YouTube’s shambolic robot-staffed admin maze, we finally managed to get an email out of them with the full list of what the BBC had complained about.

(If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, we can recommend contacting @TeamYouTube on Twitter, who appear to be actual human people and can eventually prod the robots into action.)

The signatory was a London-based BBC lawyer, who’d plucked 13 videos apparently at random from the hundreds on our channel and decided to whine about them (citing US copyright law, rather than UK) up to four and a half years later.

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Large sections of the Scottish media today trot out Variant #26 of the fortnightly “NHS SCOTLAND CRISIS!” story, namely the targets for A&E waiting times. The BBC, for example, goes with this:

While the Sunday Mail runs a remarkably similar piece except with more Anas Sarwar.

And that’s all fair enough – it’s a legitimate news story. But what’s really odd about it is that both of the articles leave out what you might imagine would be a rather crucial piece of information.

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An alert reader sent us a piece of interesting follow-up info to yesterday’s piece on NHS Scotland costs. Because comparable figures for NHS England are available too, and they make for surprising reading.

These are the Scottish figures for medicine costs at list price, ie before any negotiated discounts that the health service is able to obtain:

The population of England, at 55 million, is just over 10 times that of Scotland (5.4m). So one would imagine that its like-for-like costs would come in at around £12 billion.

But they don’t.

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