Wings Over Scotland

We must admit, we thought Ian Davidson would be a shoo-in for this particular award after his unforgettable implosion on Newsnight Scotland in August. But then we read something twice as mad and half as comprehensible. It was a piece from STV News in October, based on some comments by unfortunately-named Scottish Labour “deputy” leader and hereditary MP Anas Sarwar. We’ve read it eight or nine times now, and we still have genuinely not the slightest clue what he’s wittering on about.

We’re going to step through it line-by-line and see if we can get it to make any sense. Feel free to join in if you’ve got any ideas, because we’re stumped.

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Here’s a friendly tip – this is why people think you’re all biased Unionist stooges:

The sort of corporate tax avoidance perpetrated by companies like Vodafone, Amazon, eBay and Starbucks is indeed a scandal. It is, however, a scandal that resides entirely at Westminster. The Scottish Government has no control whatsoever over corporate tax policy, which rests wholly in the hands of David Cameron and George Osborne. For a newspaper to instead illustrate a story on the subject with a giant picture of Alex Salmond, then – on the very flimsiest of contrived justifications – is exactly the sort of thing that’ll lead people to believe you’re pursuing some sort of agenda.

(Given that the First Minister has absolutely no influence on how much tax Amazon pays, all he can do is at least try to get some benefit from them by securing hundreds of jobs for Scotland, rather than having them go elsewhere in the UK or Europe.)

So in 2013, please spare us all your hurt protestations of injured feelings at the terrible unfair slight on your integrity when awful cybernats say you’re Unionist mouthpieces. Because while your paper looks like a duck, walks like a duck and acts like a duck, nobody’s going to hear your complaint above all the quacking.

Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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Disappointingly, since we examined the state of censorship in Scottish political blogs back in April, the situation has only got worse. Even those sites which previously sat atop the table for freedom of debate have gone backwards – Bella Caledonia now snootily demands a WordPress login before it’ll deign to allow you to comment without days in the moderation queue, and Lallands Peat Worrier has tragically fallen foul of the dreaded Curse Of Captcha – while many of the others have tightened their grip even further over the year, allowing only the most anodyne of opinions to be aired.

Our award for Moderator Of The Year, though, goes not to obvious suspects like Better Nation or Labour Hame (RIP). While both still reject wholly inoffensive comments by the bucketload lest they cause their delicate readers to faint at the prospect of civil disagreement (and the former now closes comments on stories as soon as three or four days after publishing them), at least within a few days the “offending” item tends to be deleted altogether so that the would-be commenter knows where they stand.

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Fewer than one in ten of our readers follow us on Twitter, which is a bit annoying as it’s a great way of passing on interesting stuff quickly without having to put together a whole post on it. (We don’t really understand people’s objections to using Twitter. Some say it’s full of daft trivia about what celebrities had for their tea and suchlike, but that’s only true if you choose to follow those people. There’s no law that says you have to follow 1000 folk, you can follow just one if you like.)

Anyway, the point is that while everyone on Twitter is talking about it, if you aren’t you might well not have come across this piece by baby-faced left-wing wunderkind Owen Jones for the Independent yet. Called “The Strange Death Of Labour Scotland” (in a nod to Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw’s recent book of the same title), it doesn’t contain much we haven’t been saying here for the last year. But it’s always interesting to see the English left slowly starting to notice what’s going on in North Britain. Their assessment is rarely kind, and currently readers are approving of Jones’ analysis by a margin of around 15 to 1. It’s well worth a read.

While we’re not planning to shut Wings Over Scotland down during the festive break, obviously political stories are likely to be a bit thin on the ground with Parliament on recess and everyone plonked in front of Doctor Who full of turkey and booze. So to fill the gaps we’ll be resorting to some traditional methods – scattered in among new articles will be some end-of-year awards, best-ofs and perhaps the odd reprint of stories from earlier in the year when we had only a fraction of the readership we do now, and which most people therefore won’t have seen.

So let’s start with our favourite piece of terrier-like interrogation from the nation’s broadcast journalists, reporters and presenters. These are the people ultimately charged with holding our politicians to account on our behalf – literally so in the case of the BBC – so it’s vital they keep on top of their game with a firm grasp of the issues and an ability to cut through the waffle and obfuscation of their interview subjects and get to the heart of the matter.

So for a gem that dates way back to almost the first political programme of the year but which nobody managed to better for the entire 11-and-a-bit months that followed it, our first-ever “Wingy” goes to… Raymond Buchanan of BBC Scotland!

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21st November 2012

Dear Sir,

The Herald was the daily newspaper in our house when I was a child. My parents took both it and the Evening Times. When I started to outgrow the Bunty I eschewed the Jackie and its like and graduated straight to the newspapers. My father cancelled his Evening Times subscription when I was coming up to my Highers because he thought reading two newspapers every evening was interfering with my homework.

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Contrary to what might sometimes seem to be the case, we don’t much like attacking the Scottish media, particularly the self-styled “quality” end of the market. Any good democracy needs a free press to function, and with newspaper sales in freefall the economic model for proper investigative and analytical journalism faces the biggest challenge in its history. We criticise the press not because we want to destroy it, but because we want it to live, and more importantly to be worthy of that life.

There is much to cherish in the pages of the Herald and the Scotsman, even if some of it (including but not limited to Iain Macwhirter and Ian Bell in the Herald, and Ewan Crawford and George Kerevan in the Scotsman) is used to provide a figleaf of balance behind which the papers can hide their bias. But it’s impossible for the publications in question to credibly protest that bias in the light of weeks like the past one, when the Scottish and UK press has united around a campaign of what cannot be reasonably described as anything other than concerted, co-ordinated lying.

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We’re hoping to get a spot of Christmas shopping done today, assuming that we can un-freeze our front door, so here’s a few bits and bobs worth reading while we’re out.

Some sage advice for the First Minister from Iain Macwhirter

A sane analysis of the EU situation from Dr Daniel Kenealy

An informative but admirably concise assessment of the UK economy by Terry Smith

The baffling mystery of how City Parking manages to lose vast fortunes in Glasgow

Tavish Scott offers his view of independence campaign funding

Back soon, apocalypse permitting.

If there’s one thing we all ought to grudgingly respect about the No campaign, it’s its ability to get all its ducks in a row and pump out an absolutely united and consistent lie. It’s a lot like a World War 1 artillery barrage – impressive in the sheer co-ordinated brute force of its display, even if it’s in fact completely useless in achieving its desired objective and ultimately leads only to a slaughter of its own troops.

Jose Manuel Barroso must be marvelling at it today. Time after time after time he’s quite unmistakeably said “I am NOT referring to Scotland, I’m talking in generalities”, only for the British media to report it, with a single unified voice, as the EC President making clear and specific proclamations directly about Scotland.

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Perhaps the paper was confused after watching yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show, on which the host asked the question (at 37m) “Are you in favour of a squeeze on welfare?”, to which the allegedly-Labour politician Mr Balls replied “Of course!”

(Balls subsequently tried to waffle his way out of the response by claiming that he’d reduce the welfare bill by creating jobs, but Marr had expressly asked whether he backed the specific cuts to in-work benefits in the current welfare reform bill, and despite his repeating the question several times Balls refused to give an answer.)

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