Wings Over Scotland

Regular readers of Wings won’t need any reminding that Dani Garavelli of the Herald is, among some very stiff competition, one of the most contemptible pieces of nightsoil currently operating in the Scottish media.

But if you’re new here, we can give you a quick illustration.

If the sneering piety of that opening paragraph made you feel a little revolted, a bit angry and somewhat nauseous, then congratulations, because that means you’re still something minimally approximating to a decent human being. But unfortunately it gets a lot worse from there.

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We’ll be honest, readers, we gasped out loud when we saw this.

That such a basic, fundamental truth of human existence should ever be front page news with the capacity to shock 100,000 years after we invented language is a sign of just how insane our world has become since 2015.

But magnificent as it is, it’s not even today’s BEST front cover.

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Now, readers, we won’t pretend to you that our expectations were high.

But you may nevertheless wish to steel yourselves before you hear the “offer”.

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We’re stuck indoors waiting for a repairman today, so we had a little read-around of some of the less popular Scottish politics blogs to pass the time, and noted this:

James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, which we gather from its front page was seemingly one of the “Top 50 Left-Wing Blogs of 2011”, is noticeably insistent on making the argument that we’re “stalking” and “obsessed” with him.

So as we do, we thought we’d check the facts.

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Don’t watch this. You’ll only waste 12 minutes of your life making yourself angry.

It’s our job to be angry for you.

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The National carried a strange article yesterday, apropos of seemingly nothing, about a Brussels-based political thinktank supposedly linked to the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The piece actually originated on superwoke “fact-checking” site The Ferret a couple of days earlier, and professed to expose how the thinktank was “stoking Scotland’s culture war”.

Alert readers will already have pricked up their ears at this point, because “culture war” is a radical-left dogwhistle term used to obscure, belittle and dismiss groups (largely though not exclusively comprising left-wing feminists) fighting for the safeguarding of children and the protection of women’s and LGB rights.

And sure enough, nothing’s different this time.

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As more horrific experiences from survivors of rape torture gangs surface from across the UK, we must focus not on knee-jerk political posturing but on the root cause that led to the failure of these children by our society.

Political inaction has now opened the door to inevitable political mileage, nurtured from stoking vengeance in a rightly-angered public. Those only interested in creating cultural conflicts no more support justice for survivors than those who allowed this abomination to fester by looking away or worse, covering up the problem.

For any functioning society, inflicting unimaginable pain on children on an alarming scale seems unimaginable. Yet, the evidence has been in front of us for years – so why has immediate action to ensure the safeguarding of children – and vulnerable adults – not been a pressing priority?

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To be honest, readers, the peculiar events of yesterday continued to nag at us all day as every news broadcaster in Scotland and beyond leapt eagerly on the ludicrous non-story from the Herald On Sunday’s front page. (It was even the #2 item on BBC Radio Wales, inexplicably).

For such an absolute nothingball of scurrilous sub-gossip to so dominate the entire news media was just too strange to ignore. We cannot remember the last time a low-grade freelancer managed to sell the same story to FOUR major Scottish newspapers – who normally, remember, only want exclusives for their big front-page splashes – let alone a crummy opinion columnist (not even an actual news reporter) who’s only been back in journalism for five minutes after a 15-year break as a failed PR guru.

(Once they’d all run the shoddy hatchet piece, TV and radio then had all the excuse they needed to blare it across the airwaves. “Oh, it’s not us inflating and amplifying this garbage, guv, we’re just reporting what the papers are saying.”)

So in our eternal quest for enlightenment and understanding we thought we’d see if we could find out a bit more about the little-known but recently-revived sleeper assassin with the ironic name: Carlos Alba.

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From here, the top of the barrel is so far away that you can’t see so much as a pinprick of daylight through the most powerful pair of binoculars.

In a moving epitaph a few days ago, the widely-respected Professor James Mitchell of the University Of Glasgow noted of Alex Salmond that:

“He could be irascible and did not put up with fools […] He was impatient with lazy journalism […] and did not hide it. We can still see the consequences in some of the obituaries and commentary that reveal more about the writers than the subject”.

Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine concurred, saying:

“In the clamour for commentators to vent their loathing, there have been too many sour column inches that have framed a man’s premature death around the egos of the journalists that have penned them.

Too great an appetite to rescue the words that were once filed and then spiked following a trial that didn’t give them the verdict they had prepared for. Too much haste to use his passing as the opportunity to seek revenge for a tongue-lashing or a put-down that they had never forgotten.”

And so, then, to Carlos Alba.

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Alex Salmond will be laid to rest in the green turf of Aberdeenshire today in a quiet and dignified private ceremony. (A public celebration of his life will take place next month.)

Most of Scotland’s press and commentariat beclowned itself shamefully after his death just as it did during his life, but below is a (regrettably short) collection of those who did otherwise and who deserve to be noted honourably beside the man himself.

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Wherever you find giants, you also find parasites, bottom-feeders and carrion. When a mighty lion dies in the jungle, tiny creeping crawling maggots and insects and bacteria feast gleefully on its corpse for many days.

Which naturally brings us to the Scottish media.

The above paragraphs of cowardly innuendo and baseless speculative smearing were penned by Severin Carrell and Libby Brooks in the Guardian on Monday. (They’re not from the ironically-headed “Appreciation” that the same two hacks wrote for Sunday’s Observer, in which they audaciously claimed that Salmond’s success was down to Nicola Sturgeon).

They sneakily imply that Salmond was guilty not only of the sexual assaults of which he was cleared in court, but also of an unspecified number of unnamed others, and make assertions of “disturbing evidence about his personal conduct” without specifying what that evidence or conduct might have been.

Naively, we’d imagined that as repulsive as those lines are – though not surprising, as Brooks has always been a keen participant in the whispering campaign from allies of Sturgeon trying to discredit the trial verdict – they were as bad as things would get.

We weren’t even close.

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