Wings Over Scotland

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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So we stumbled, we thought, across a random Twitter idiot this morning.

Alert readers may have spotted a flaw or two in that claim.

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Political pundits on both sides on the border often marvel at how the SNP appear able to defy the normal rules of electoral gravity, still holding a comfortable double-digit lead in the polls after more than 11 years in power. But there’s no great mystery to it, and the answer is simple, in several senses of that word.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to present to you Scottish Labour’s offering for who’d be in charge of all the Scottish Government’s money if the SNP weren’t in power – finance spokesman James Kelly MSP.

Let’s check those numbers, shall we?

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Although this site is blacklisted by the press regulator IPSO and therefore unable to file complaints about inaccurate and misleading newspaper articles, our alert readers sometimes pick up the baton from Wings articles and do the job themselves.

We reported one such example a week ago.

But the reader who took up that complaint has furnished us with a bit of interesting background to the story, and also news of a rather more alarming outcome.

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The Sun (English edition only, the Scottish one goes for a domestic murrdurr story) has an inflammatory front page today, as Parliament debates the most important series of votes so far on Brexit, including one to overrule devolution.

It’s a rerun of a(n in)famous previous front-page illustration from the paper, which you can see below. But there’s something odd about it.

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This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.

The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.

Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.

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We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.

Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.

But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.

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So this story is the front page of tonight’s Evening Times.

It’s a pretty slim piece deploying a Glasgow mother to attack the SNP-run city council over a recent increase in nursery fees, and it sounds like the new higher cost might be a pretty big deal to her.

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Well, the timing of this is rather unfortunate.

If only someone had said something, eh?

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The Scottish Sunday Express yesterday had a shock-horror exposé about a “HUGE loophole” in the Scottish Government’s minimum-pricing legislation for alcohol.

We thought we’d give it a quick once-over. You’re in for a HUGE shock, readers.

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Alert readers may recall that the Electoral Commission recently chose, to everyone’s (cough) great surprise, to take no action against extremist Unionist shout-monkeys Scotland In Union over a number of clear breaches of electoral rules, or for failing to disclose a number of large donations from extremely wealthy donors.

10 days ago the EC published a tranche of FOI documents relating to the case on its website, with the donor details redacted to protect the identity of the various Lords, Dukes, Earls and Countesses who’d rather you didn’t know that they’d been handing thousands of pounds at a time to SiU.

Or at least, sort of redacted.

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