Wings Over Scotland

Wings Over Scotland isn’t the only website dedicated to scrutinising the truthfulness of things claimed by politicians and media pundits. There’s the widely-respected and diligent FullFact.org, there’s Scotland’s own The Ferret, and there’s the BBC’s Reality Check (which frequently takes the more unconventional approach of, er, not making a finding either way about what the reality of things is).

And then there’s Channel 4’s FactCheck, which we’re going to generously assume had a liquid lunch yesterday and was a little under the weather.

Because not only is the conclusion that it reached on the subject of an independent Scotland having to use the Euro utter nonsense that’s been debunked roughly 1000 times in the last six years, it doesn’t even agree with itself.

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The Scotsman is delighted to have some bad news to report:

So, the number of teachers is falling, right?

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Sundays have been the low point of Scottish political journalism for a while now. Traditionally a day when newspapers are heavy on comment and light on news (because politics tends to happen on weekdays), they unleash all the weary old dinosaurs who’ve been driving away readers for the last 30 years.

So you really have to stand out to be noticed for especially appalling hackery on a Sunday, which is probably why nobody from Scotland On Sunday wanted to have their name on this toe-curling piece of second-hand, lifted-from-another-paper garbage.

Professor Ronald MacDonald, you say? That name seems to ring a bell.

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Michael Glackin of the Sunday Times is the only serious contender to the Scotsman’s demented Brian Wilson as the most poisonously, blindly instinctive hater of anything even passingly connected to the SNP or independence in the Scottish media. His weekly bilious rants in the paper make even Scottish Daily Express hacks wince and say “Blimey, that’s a bit strong”.

But even by those standards, this week’s column is quite something. So let’s take a little look at just how much of an idiot you can make of yourself if you never allow facts to get in the way of your rage.

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In today’s Daily Record:

Half, you say?

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What does two plus two make?

Let’s all do it together, shall we?

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Last night we observed the considerable statistical difficulty involved in getting to speak on the BBC’s flagship political debate show Question Time not just once, or even twice, but THREE times, and the remarkable ease with which shouty sectarian UKIP and Loyalist bigot Billy Mitchell has achieved it.

But readers, we’re afraid we must acknowledge a rare factual inaccuracy on Wings Over Scotland. Because he’s actually been on it at least FOUR times.

And the odds against that happening by chance are really quite something.

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This tweet, from a little over a year ago, remarks on the second consecutive speaking appearance on the BBC’s flagship Question Time of Billy Mitchell, a flute-band Loyalist and former UKIP candidate (an impressive 34 votes in Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill in 2013) whose standard contribution to the national debate is an incoherent shouted rant against the SNP and all they stand for.

It was comment-worthy because it’s actually quite a feat to get on Question Time twice. The audience is vetted on numerous grounds and the show deliberately discriminates against people who’ve previously come through the heavily-oversubscribed ballot, so that the widest possible range of voices get a chance to be heard.

So the odds of not only getting on twice but then being selected to speak twice are extremely long – an absolute minimum of 1,000 to 1 depending on the size of the venue. The chances of managing it three times are astronomical.

So we tip our hats to Eileen from Glasgow tonight.

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From the Scottish Daily Mail today:

As readers will have come to expect, the article is entirely free of any figures by which readers could gauge whether 1000 was a high number or not. So as usual, we’ll have to do it for them.

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Obviously this site will be making no comment on the criminal allegations now facing Alex Salmond for legal reasons. But amidst a frenzy of gleefully lascivious coverage in the Scottish media (the Daily Record in particular can barely contain its delight), there’s another thread of punditry that does need addressed.

Because it is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks.

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The extremely sharp and perceptive New Statesman writer Stephen Bush buries some of his political insight in a daily email newsletter (because, we assume, his fax machine doesn’t work, you can’t send telegrams any more and London flats don’t have enough room to keep a lot of messenger pigeons or let you send smoke signals).

And it’s a lot easier just to quote you a chunk of today’s than it is to rewrite the same observations into a new article ourselves.

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Nicola Sturgeon attended a meeting of the SNP NEC yesterday.

Or maybe she didn’t.

One of these people/publications, inescapably, is flat-out lying to their readers about the event in question. Given the Scottish media’s ingrained habit of lying about pretty much everything almost all of the time, we honestly wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to which one of them it was.