Wings Over Scotland

It can be hard to keep up with the Scotsman’s constant “finessing” of its news stories. For example, last night we followed a link to an interesting-sounding piece with the headline “UK’s Scots independence claims ‘on very thin ice'”.

It led to a David Maddox article on Professor David Scheffer’s recent comments suggesting that the UK Government’s official position – that an independent Scotland would inherit a worst-of-both-worlds share of the UK’s debt obligations, but none of the UK’s memberships of international bodies – was somewhat less than robust.

So when we saw the same story prominently featured on the front page of the paper’s website this morning, something seemed amiss.

Read the rest of this entry →

Whenever we put up one of our very occasional football-related posts, a few readers grump about their apparent lack of connection to the wider sphere of Scottish politics. So we couldn’t help but notice this comment lurking unassumingly in the middle of a Davie Provan rant in today’s Scottish Sun about the Rangers cheating verdict:

“Despite the £250,000 non-disclosure fine, Nimmo Smith ruled that Rangers had gained ‘no sporting advantage’ through their use of EBTs. If that’s good enough for the man who tried the Lockerbie bomber, it should be good enough for the rest of us.”

We think that’s what they used to call “friendly fire”.

The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

Read the rest of this entry →

We followed a bit of a long and winding road ourselves to stumble across this rather excellent piece from the Scotsman archives today, and owe a major hat-tip to alert reader “Alexandre Dumas” for a hefty helping hand. It comes from the paper’s editorial leader column of the 26th of March 2007, less than two weeks before the Holyrood election that saw the first ever SNP government.

We’re not sure which is our favourite bit. See what yours is.

Read the rest of this entry →

Not content with this morning’s Daily Mail masterclass in misinformation on pensions and embassies, eagle-eyed reader Andy Inglis also offers us this quite remarkable interpretation of the Eastleigh by-election result from the same source:

There’s been a “seismic political upset” in England, so Scotland should stay in the Union to ensure “continuing political stability”, even though being in the Union has brought us “an unknown future at a time of global crisis and financial meltdown”. Eh?

In fact, reading between the lines the piece SEEMS to say “If Scotland doesn’t stay in the Union, the Tories won’t be able to win the next election”. We’re not absolutely sure that’s quite the No-campaign vote-winner the Mail appears to think it is.

First the lies (from the print-only editions of today’s Daily Mail):

And then the truth, from our own Scott Minto a week ago.

Decide for yourself who to believe.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s an interesting story on the BBC website this morning on the subject of EU membershi- WAIT! COME BACK! Honestly, it really IS quite interesting!

The UK state broadcaster’s Scottish outpost has undertaken what could under certain conditions be described as journalism, by conducting a survey of 27 EU member states (plus imminent newcomer Croatia) to find out their view of what an independent Scotland’s status would be. 23 of the 28 either ignored the Beeb’s request or wouldn’t commit to an opinion, but the teeny Baltic state of Latvia (pop. 2.2m, EU member since 2004) pluckily threw its 2-Lats-worth into the debate.

Read the rest of this entry →

Our story of this morning raised an interesting issue in the comments, namely whether sites like this one are actually helping to prop up the Scottish mainstream media by linking to its articles and thereby generating web traffic, page rankings and money for what is too often a toxic and dishonest propaganda tool for the Union.

For some time, readers have occasionally pointed this out to us and urged us not to help them, so that their deaths might be hastened. But here’s the conflict: we have no desire to destroy Scottish journalism, only to keep it honest.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re indebted to an alert reader for pointing us towards this intriguing story:

“For knowingly selling paid links, The Scotsman and JP’s regional news sites were not removed from the search results – you can still find The Scotsman’s site if you perform a brand related navigational search. They have however, had their pagerank scores reduced drastically, and Google now trusts them less. The Scotsman’s pagerank dropped from 7 to 3, most of Johnston Press’ regional sites involved had their pagerank reduced to 0.

For the Scotsman website, this is a disaster. Dropping to a pagerank of 3 means that the search engine rankings they used to command for generic searches are gone – most likely for good. So – declining brand-led traffic and negligible Google search traffic for the foreseeable future. No new visitors from Google, and declining brand loyalty. The Scotsman website just became a very tough sell to any potential advertiser.”

Click the words for more details about how an increasingly discredited Scottish mainstream media is resorting to desperate measures to survive, then consider if you might want to fund more honest reporting, lest you be left with none at all.

We must admit, the “Red Paper Collective” – dragged up for a quote today by the Herald’s Magnus Gardham – was a new entity on us. A quick Google reveals that they seem to be a Labour Party offshoot, a fact Gardham unaccountably neglected to mention in his piece describing them merely as “trade union activists”.

So we perhaps shouldn’t waste too much time paying attention to their critical views about “Yes To A Just Scotland”, the document released by the official Yes campaign today. But one line does rather beg to be highlighted for the contempt in which the No campaign evidently holds the people of Scotland.

Read the rest of this entry →

The reliably toxic Simon Johnson in the Telegraph this morning:

“Blair Jenkins, the campaign’s chief executive, published [Yes To A Just Scotland] hours after suffering an embarrassing defeat in a mock referendum at Glasgow University, where students rejected independence by a margin of two to one.”

Actual result of referendum: 62-38, a margin of 1.6/1.

Size of Mr Johnson’s casual exaggeration: 25%. (1.6 x 1.25 = 2)

But seriously, though – what is it about believing in the Union that apparently renders educated people suddenly unable to count? We have no idea, but it may go some way to explaining the UK’s credit-rating downgrade.

This sort of thing does seem to be happening with disturbing frequency at the august offices of the Scotsman these days. Yesterday’s paper ran a story under the stark headline “EU budget cuts ‘will favour the English’, says SNP”.

[EDIT: Also spun into a truly vile column by Michael Kelly today.]

You’ve been playing this game a while now, readers. See if you can guess which words from the headline don’t actually appear anywhere in the story.

Read the rest of this entry →