Wings Over Scotland

There’s a remarkable piece in today’s Times about Stefan Cross, the lawyer working for the women in the Glasgow City Council equal-pay dispute. (For example it’s over 1500 words long but the word “Labour” doesn’t appear a single time, despite the party having controlled the council for the entire 20 years or so the dispute covers.)

The most interesting passage, though, is this one.

Because the story reveals that the GMB, an ultra-loyalist Labour and Unionist trade union, did absolutely everything in its power to obstruct and hamper the women’s claims until the spring of 2017, at which point the union experienced a Damascene conversion and threw their weight fully behind the women and against the council.

If only there’d been some fundamental alteration in the nature of the council around a year and a half ago which could explain such a “complete cultural change” in the GMB’s attitude and enthusiasm for equality, eh readers?

The BBC’s Scottish politics website today prominently carries this story:

Our famously alert readers may recall as far back as five-and-a-half months ago, which was the last time the Scottish media tried to whip up demented scare stories about baby boxes, which have been given to every new mother in Finland for approximately 70 years and caused absolutely no documented problems.

So what’s fresh about the story to justify this significant new coverage? Let’s see.

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The Scottish Daily Mail today has a big headline relaying the seemingly-unambiguous bad news that unemployment in Scotland has apparently risen by 11,000.

But cheer up, folks, because better times are ahead.

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We’re blacklisted by the press regulator IPSO, but fortunately when we raise issues with especially blatant inaccuracies in UK newspapers alert readers sometimes take up the cudgel and file complaints with them because we can’t.

One such case was when the Daily Express published a story this summer with the eye-rubbing and creatively-capitalised headline “MAJORITY of Scots BACK BREXIT as SNP support PLUMMETS from voters backing Ruth Davidson”.

And, y’know, that’s not a very true thing to say.

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A famous quote commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (and hotly disputed, as always, by point-missing Quote Nazis), runs that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

It’s been bouncing around our heads for the last couple of days, because with the SNP annual conference in full swing in Glasgow, Scottish political pundits have taken it upon themselves to start issuing bizarre assertions/advice about the party’s strategy for securing a second independence referendum.

This version, from the Herald’s cut-price David Torrance knockoff Mark Smith today, is no more than we’d expect from that source:

But we were a lot more surprised to see the notion also being taken up by someone we’d previously credited with a lot more insight and intelligence.

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Especially alert readers may have noticed that we’ve had a new page on Wings for a while, maintaining a current list of Scottish newspaper circulations.

We were just checking it today and noticed that – seemingly unreported anywhere – the Scottish “regionals” had had their biannual figures published, so we thought we may as well keep you updated.

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It’s probably time we started collecting all the media articles from the last couple of weeks about our ongoing legal battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, because it’s getting increasingly hard to plough through them all.

The story that Labour were pulling Dugdale’s legal funding was first broken by the Huffington Post on 19 September. Below is all the coverage we’ve found between then and now (most recent first). As best as we can recollect, incidentally, we’ve been asked for quotes for TWO of these stories.

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Three days ago, the Daily Record’s political editor and Kezia Dugdale’s chief media cheerleader Davie Clegg tweeted that Scottish Labour had “expressed full support and solidarity” for their former branch manager in her court battle with this website.

It seems fair to say that the tweet hasn’t aged well.

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Politics in 2018 is almost impossible to satirise, and nowhere more so than in Scotland, where at least two of the main parties are currently campaigning on the principled policy of “any referendum we lose should be re-run, and any we win must never ever be held again because the decision was final”.

So it’s quite understandable that the Dateline 2018 team – Scotland’s only currently operating satirists of any kind (which is, madly, true) – opted not to bother with any Scottish content in their last series. But they’ve totally promised that they’ll absolutely definitely do some this time, honest, if you fund them for another one.

Yeah, we’d be sceptical too. But they only need £7,500 by tomorrow to carry on, and if they don’t reach the target you get your money back, so if you just got paid and can spare a couple of quid then fire it their way by clicking on the pic, because frankly we don’t like to think about what they’d get up to if we don’t keep them occupied.

We’ve been keeping coverage of our ongoing court battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale to a minimum on the site, partly because little of any material impact has actually happened yet.

However, there was a mildly interesting development last night, which was scooped and accurately reported by the Scottish Sun.

Reactions to the party’s statement have already seen serious amounts of what we’re generously going to call “misinformation” generated and circulating around social media, so we’re going to have to clear some of it up. Apologies.

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From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

Sounds terrible. Let’s take a look in more depth at this rising tide.

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Chris McEleny is an SNP councillor. This is a personal opinion.

Three weeks into the Salmond saga and the MSM are getting increasingly desperate. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the breathless excitement of reportage of the Daily Record and their sister paper the Sunday Mail.

For three successive days last week they led on the “story” which meant it was the third week running where Salmond appeared on the front page of the Mail.

However, our friends down in Central Quay have a problem.

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