Wings Over Scotland

Mainstream and social media alike are now well into their second day of an absolutely epic meltdown at the news that Alex Salmond is to broadcast a chat show on RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC.

It really is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the shrieking fit the decision has produced. Addled old Lords with criminal convictions for violently and drunkenly assaulting Her Majesty’s police have with an audacious lack of self-awareness decried the immorality of one of HM’s advisors going on TV to talk about stuff, and one Lib Dem MSP has even gone so far as to raise a Holyrood motion demanding that the state interferes with the lawful employment choices of a private citizen.

We imagine that RT will be beside itself with joy at the avalanche of publicity the UK press and political sphere is giving it. We’d be amazed if the hysterical brouhaha didn’t double or treble the audience figures that Salmond could otherwise have expected.

It’s just that it’s all a little, well, sudden.

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We’re not a Catalonian-politics website and we don’t even have an opinion on whether Catalonia should be independent, but sometimes it’s easier to understand the workings and failings of the media if you watch how it behaves on a subject you’re not directly and closely involved with. Last week was one of those weeks.

Below is a clip from yesterday’s edition of Sunday Politics Scotland. It features a man called José Rodriguez Mora, who was introduced to SPS viewers neutrally as simply an academic from Edinburgh University but was in fact instrumental in the creation of a stridently anti-independence Catalonian political party.

He was brought on to give voice to what has become the universal UK-media spin on events in Catalonia – that both sides are to blame, that the Catalan government was provocative and irresponsible to call an “illegal” referendum, and that the only way for the area to achieve independence is through the 1978 Spanish constitution, despite it expressly forbidding any such action and its cornerstone of existence (also known as the “Preliminary Title”) being “based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation”.

So in the striking absence of any useful information in the press, we thought we’d do a little digging and see how that might work.

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Quite a few remarkable things were said on last night’s STV debate between the two prospective leaders of the Labour Party branch office in Scotland. This one, though, was especially striking.

That’s Anas Sarwar denying three times that he was a part of the “Better Together” campaign with the Tories. A startled Colin Mackay claims to have seen photographs of Sarwar campaigning with BT, at which point Sarwar insists no, he merely appeared on TV debates which happened to also have Tory guests.

It seemed like it’d be an easy thing to check.

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Investigative site The Ferret this afternoon published a report into the Scottish Futures Trust, the SNP’s replacement for Labour’s cripplingly costly PFI projects.

The report was undertaken by Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, a pair of economists well regarded in nationalist circles, and makes some interesting if vague comments about downsides that MIGHT, in theory, exist in the SFT now or in the future.

The headline claims are all full of highly-qualified language (“may not deliver value for money”; “profits may be unduly high”; “could restrict growth”; “potentially has adverse implications”; “impossible to tell whether“), and it’s a long way down the page until you get to anything approaching a hard fact, or indeed the revelation that the report seems to have been paid for by Scottish Labour.

And that’s when things get a little weird.

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:

If only there was somewhere that Labour DID already run the NHS so that we could judge the truth of that claim, eh readers?

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Readers, we’d like you to meet Steven MacGregor. He’s the chap on the right of this pic, taken last Monday while campaigning for the Tories in Ochil & South Perthshire with party leader Ruth Davidson, just a foot or so away from him.

He likes the England rugby and football teams, Jeremy Clarkson, AC/DC, the British Natural Bodybuilding Federation, and Oliver Mundell. He seems a lovely chap.

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Apologies in advance about this, folks, but it’s driving us mad. We got into a Twitter argument with some Tory balloon last night and this morning, and to cut a long story short it got us looking at the 1951 UK general election result.

History records it as a Tory majority, securing just over half of the Parliamentary seats (321 of 625) and forming the government under Winston Churchill despite narrowly losing the popular vote to Labour (48% to 48.8%).

But if you examine the result in the House Of Commons Library the numbers don’t add up, and we can’t figure out why.

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We hadn’t been planning to talk any more about the curious case of Claire Austin, the suddenly publicity-shy Edinburgh nurse who – how can we put this? – seemed a rather ill-chosen figurehead for the good cause of getting more pay for a group of people who are rightly well-regarded by the public.

But yesterday, the release of a letter from Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale re-opened political hostilities after last week’s hiatus for the Manchester terror attack by shoving the now-reticent Ms Austin right back into the spotlight.

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We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Readers who’ve been following the ongoing avalanche of disturbing revelations about bigotry, sectarianism and racism among the ranks of Scottish Conservative politicians probably won’t need to be told that the party’s talent pool is desperately shallow.

More than a quarter of its Scottish candidates for the forthcoming UK general election actually already hold elected office – nine of them as councillors, four as MSPs, one as an MEP and of course the sole defending member, David Mundell.

(Several of the councillors have only been in their jobs for a matter of a few days and are already looking to scurry off to London for new ones.)

As for the rest, though – and following the discovery that at least two of its council candidates earlier this month had no idea that they were standing – the party’s clearly been doing some more hasty press-ganging.

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This week the Scottish media went in quite heavily with the news that Ruth Davidson had signed up “Scottish fishing industry leaders” to back the UK government over the Scottish Government, after the latter had warned that Westminster planned to sell out the industry again during Brexit negotiations.

To be honest we didn’t pay it a lot of heed, assuming that “Scottish fishing industry leaders” just meant Bertie Armstrong again – a longstanding ultra-staunch Unionist and Leave supporter with a track record as a reliable anti-independence rentaquote – and nothing in the coverage led us to believe otherwise.

But then we saw a picture:

Mr Armstrong is the white-haired and bearded chap standing immediately to the right of Davidson in the photo, with his hand on the top corner of her pledge. But who’s the fellow immediately to the left of her?

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Unionists were barely able to hide their excitement last month at the thought of some dead pensioners. This was former Labour MSP Dr Richard Simpson, for example:

(Simpson later went on to embellish the claim by saying that it had in fact reversed.)

The story was serious enough to be the Sunday Times Scotland front page lead.

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