Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.
(Click the image for the full audio.)
This really happened today.
Read it for yourself by clicking the pic. (No Mail Online traffic will be generated.)
It’s the “catastrophic” that makes it special.
There’s an interesting piece in today’s Scotsman, entitled “Why isn’t Scotland making more popular films?” and bemoaning the poor condition of the Scottish film industry.
At the end it contains the following paragraphs.
We must admit, we’re baffled by the Daily Mail’s sudden and extraordinary attack on Ralph Miliband, the long-dead father of Ed and David. If there’s any publication on Earth you’d think WOULDN’T feel on very solid ground lecturing other people on stuff they said in the 1930s and 1940s, you might imagine the Daily Mail would be it.
We can’t for the life of us work out what the right-wing hatezine thinks it could possibly have to gain from such a hysterical, vile assault, which even most Conservatives are disassociating themselves from in embarrassment.
The current Labour leader has often spoken of his rejection of his father’s strong left-wing views (indeed, he does so in the rebuttal the Mail has, albeit with the greatest of ill-grace, published today), so goodness knows what the paper is trying to achieve.
Other than, perhaps, to tempt Labour into displays of gross hypocrisy.
As far back as I can recall, I haven’t believed in anything.
I’ve had no over-riding passion for change, I’ve felt jaded and disconnected from the establishment, from the institutions. Westminster and the political scene of the UK was framed by a “they’re all the same” mentality. All I saw was greed and corruption in people who didn’t represent my view of the world, but that’s just how it is, right? It’ll always be the same, we can’t change it.
But maybe we can.
Sometimes it’s hard not to salute the Scottish media’s sheer dogged, implacable commitment to misinformation, even in the face of seemingly-impossible odds.
Yesterday’s fiasco at First Minister’s Questions, where Johann Lamont dug herself a great big hole while trying to smear a successful Scottish businessman and imply corruption where none existed, was so farcically absurd and ham-fisted that the Scotsman had to bite its tongue and report it with the headline “Apology demanded over Lamont’s SNP land deal claim”.
Even Newsnight Scotland couldn’t brush it off, with hapless Labour MSP James Kelly wheeled on as the sacrificial bam sent to bluster his way through some rather timid questioning from Gordon Brewer. But no such trifling concepts as basic journalistic integrity or competence were going to trouble Magnus Gardham at the Herald.
You know how it is when you’re writing a satirical newspaper website like The Onion or The Daily Mash. There’s a very fine line to walk such that a joke article is ridiculous enough to be funny, yet still just plausible enough to fool the unwary into believing it’s a real story, and it takes real skill to get it right.
So we wish the best of luck to promising new outfit “The Express”, who’ve perhaps just overcooked it a bit with this effort, but definitely show some potential.
Wait, what?
The papers, as you’d expect, take some differing views today of John Swinney’s draft Scottish Government budget, delivered in the Holyrood chamber yesterday. But two articles in particular caught our eye.
As you can perhaps tell, we’re starting to run out of post titles referencing “1984” and the Ingsoc habit of rewriting newspaper versions of history to pretend that certain things which happened didn’t happen, and vice versa. Here’s today’s case in point:
Wait a minute – “shifts to”? Are we sure about that?
Sometimes even a site like this, dedicated to spending a large percentage of its time exposing the barely-concealed bias of the Scottish press, is almost lost for words.
We’ll see if we can dredge up a few for the latest plume of billowing black smoke and flame to spurt out during the death-dive of the Scotsman, though.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
