Wings Over Scotland

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.

Scottish Labour mounted another of their infamous stunt “protests” today, as always dutifully assisted and advertised by the Scottish media.

STV reported it as an event organised by a small rail union – not the RMT or ASLEF, but the little-known Transport Salaried Staff Association – which would feature “other campaigners”, but in fact it was a Scottish Labour shindig from top to bottom, with no union branding visible anywhere and Scottish Labour on all the placards.

Well, we say “all”.

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STV News gets the new year off to a cheery start today:

The headline, as alert readers will be accustomed to by now, is a flat-out lie. As far as the article reveals – and there’s nothing on the company’s website offering any more detail, nor in the longer quotes we found elsewhere – chartered accountants French Duncan LLP have in fact made no predictions whatsoever as to the number of Scottish insolvencies in 2019, merely recorded the number that took place in 2018.

STV’s claim that the 2018 figure of 12,000 “could be even higher by the end of 2019” appears, then, to have been entirely invented. But the depressing tone – which the Daily Express turns into a full-blown crisis, roping in Murdo Fraser for some SNP BAD rentaguff along the way – is even more inexplicable than simple fabrication.

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There’s a digital edition of the Times out today, but the normal Scotland section doesn’t make the cut. (There’s normally an Ireland section too – although it doesn’t get billed on the Contents list – which is also missing today, and there’s never a Wales section for some reason.)

Maybe if we all keep really quiet they’ll completely forget we’re here and not Brexit us either. Have a good one, readers.

We can think of no better illustrative metaphor for the brain-withering idiot festival that was 2018 than page 16 of today’s Sunday Mail, which in the space of a single inch of newsprint predicts both SNP gains at any new general election, and then SNP losses to the exact same Labour and Tory parties that the editorial on the left excoriates as incompetent, “deluded” and “moribund”.

We wish we could rationally hope 2019 will be any better.

It’s fair to say, readers, that Wings Over Scotland is somewhat cynical about the UK and Scottish media. It’s pretty much our thing. Very little about it behaving maliciously, untruthfully or incompetently genuinely shocks us. But today is one of those rare days.

Votes of no confidence in a UK government are even more uncommon. The last one was almost 40 years ago. They’re extremely dramatic and newsworthy events. So it’s a little odd that one has been called this afternoon and the British state broadcaster has absolutely nothing to say about it, even on its politics website.

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We’re on about Day 79 of NoScottishPoliticsNewsGate (today’s big “EXCLUSIVE!” in the Herald is something we told you about last Friday, and was also an “exclusive” in yesterday’s Scottish Sun), so we found ourselves getting diverted by something else in the papers this morning.

The Scottish Daily Mail had a piece on the cost of train journeys from Scotland, and living in Bath you don’t need to tell us how scandalously expensive British railways are compared to almost any other country in the Northern Hemisphere.

But the Mail is the Mail, and it couldn’t help distorting even an open-goal of a story like that until it had almost no relation to reality. And it’s a very useful illustration, should anybody need yet another one, of how this country’s newspapers vastly mislead their readers without actually technically lying.

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The front page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

As alert readers of this site will know, the Mail has a particular fondness for presenting statistics bereft of any context so that people have no idea how big or small they really are. So is 1,600 passengers a week receiving compensation for delays a lot or a little? Let’s find out.

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