So, to the elephant in the room, then. Certain elements of the Scottish press are busting a gut today in an attempt to fabricate a scandal around a man writing some honest opinions in a newspaper for money.
Judging by the tone of the coverage, it seems they have a case, in so far as that Scottish newspapers are plainly no place for honesty.
We try very very hard not to be crude on this website. But sometimes you’ve just got to bite the bullet and point out that someone’s a completely boneheaded moron who shouldn’t be sent out for bread and milk without grown-up supervision, let alone given a senior political position in what was once a respectable major party.
Margaret Curran wants to be Secretary of State for Scotland.
We were up very late last night after a poker game. We think we might still be in some sort of fever dream, because however much we rub our eyes we can’t quite believe what we’re seeing in Scotland’s media this morning.
We’ll get to the bizarre story about the alleged hacking of Yes Scotland’s email and the No camp’s desperate, astonishing, barely believable attempts to whip up a smokescreen around it later. But first we want to take a quick look at something we missed yesterday in all the fundraising excitement, and which one of our indispensably alert readers brought our attention to.
The Scotsman goes big this morning on a story revealing that John Swinney has admitted accidentally misinterpreting a report from Lloyds Banking Group which said that the oil and gas industry would create 34,000 new jobs in the UK over the next two years. A Scottish Government paper in July originally said the jobs would all come to Scotland, but the error was corrected within three days.
While most papers give the issue a couple of short lines, the Scotsman runs the news twice, once in a substantial article of its own and also (for some reason we can’t quite fathom) as a sizeable addendum tacked onto its lead story about Henry McLeish criticising the relentless negativity of the No campaign.
The Scotsman is quite right to highlight this embarrassing clanger. After all, what sort of hapless bumbling idiot could have published something which misinterpreted the Lloyds report as referring to solely Scottish jobs?
We’ve been getting quite a lot of emails and other messages recently from people complaining about what they perceive to be heavily biased moderation of comments on the website of the Herald. We haven’t done anything about them because most of them lacked any supporting evidence, but today we decided to gather some.
And what we discovered was pretty disturbing.
While the Scottish print media continues to almost totally blank our Panelbase opinion poll, it’s nice to know that they’re nevertheless paying close attention to its findings.
Below is the headline of a story from this morning’s Independent.
We’ve read the article in question several times now looking for the supposed “bad news” for the Scottish First Minister, and we’re having no luck at all. Perhaps you can help us out with it, readers.
If you weren’t up at 8.45am or so (it’s the weekend), click the image below to hear the interview on Good Morning Scotland on the subject of our Panelbase opinion poll.
The poll was also discussed (again) by prominent psephologist Professor John Curtice, who made a few helpful comments by way of expert advice. We’re new to the polling game, so let’s quickly address them.
We’re using that phrase in the sense of “the end of the universe”, we should say.
We’ve done interviews for radio in the BBC’s tiny Bath studio before, but this is the first time we’ve had to let ourselves in and do the whole thing solo.
Newsnet Scotland this morning attacks some comments by BBC presenter James Naughtie in which he remarks disapprovingly on the aesthetic state of Princes Street in Edinburgh. To be honest, we’re with the Beeb’s man on this one – as documented by the splendid Facebook page Lost Edinburgh, the capital’s main thoroughfare is a living catalogue of grotesque crimes against architecture, and the additional havoc wreaked on it by years of needless tram works doesn’t need any detailing here.
The piece does reveal something much more interesting, though.
We were very proud of a terrific performance from Scotland at Wembley last night, in a highly entertaining friendly the national side was unlucky to lose due to a couple of lapses in concentration at set pieces. We also greatly enjoyed the tremendous atmosphere created by both sets of fans, which we read about in the Daily Mail:
And also in the Scottish Daily Mail:
Wait, what?
…to reporting of opinion polls in the Scottish media! These are all from today:
Vital data, there. And definitely more interesting and important than learning that two-thirds of Scots don’t believe the promises of improved devolution after a No vote.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
