Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.
And it didn’t even go down fighting.
The Sun (English edition only, the Scottish one goes for a domestic murrdurr story) has an inflammatory front page today, as Parliament debates the most important series of votes so far on Brexit, including one to overrule devolution.
It’s a rerun of a(n in)famous previous front-page illustration from the paper, which you can see below. But there’s something odd about it.
This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.
The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.
Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.
We’re having a lot of trouble with this one, to be honest.
The Record, along with Scottish Labour and a lot of the left of social media, are up in arms that a mystery benefactor has donated a £230,000 Rolls Royce to Glasgow City Council for the use of the Lord Provost. But nobody can quite manage to explain why they’re so angry about it.
We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.
Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.
But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.
So this story is the front page of tonight’s Evening Times.
It’s a pretty slim piece deploying a Glasgow mother to attack the SNP-run city council over a recent increase in nursery fees, and it sounds like the new higher cost might be a pretty big deal to her.
It’s been a very sluggish few months in Scottish politics news, with only the significant but rather dry matter of the Brexit power grab to talk about, so you’d imagine that the publication earlier this month of some important new statistics concerning the Scottish economy would have raised some media attention.
Yet fully three weeks after the figures were released we can’t locate a single word of coverage from any newspapers or broadcasters, and that’s odd.
After all, whenever some economic figures pop up showing Scotland in a bad light – especially when some financial thinktank has also passed comment – the press isn’t usually slow to jump all over them, so oh wait we see what’s happened here.
Perhaps go and take a look for yourself. Because you’ll grow very old waiting for the Scottish press to tell you about it.
I came by a little snippet of games-magazine history this week – via an unlikely route that needn't concern us here – and I just thought I'd share it for the historical record.
Atari ST Review was a magazine published by EMAP in 1992 and 1993, when after just 12 issues it was suddenly sold to Europress, leading to this editorial column in a suspiciously large typeface:
But alert readers might have noticed (from the slightly off alignment of the red border) that the column actually took the form of a hastily-applied sticker. Because that wasn't the editor's original leader.
After 27 unbroken pages of royal wedding “news” (following on from a full 46 in its Sunday edition), the Scottish Daily Mail finally gets down to reporting other stuff today.
“Union support rising”, eh? Do we have any numbers on that?
To the best of our recollection, today’s Sunday Politics Scotland was the first time a representative from this site has ever been invited onto a BBC Scotland TV show to discuss the affairs of the day since Wings was founded back in 2011. So we thought we better capture it for posterity in case it’s another seven years until the next one.
The bits that didn’t make it to air are below.
Just before we (thankfully) stop talking about this insanity entirely, one last thing.
This month, just for fun and a bit of a change, we’ve commissioned a Panelbase poll NOT of voters in Scotland, but our neighbours to the south. English folk are always complaining that in a world of UK devolution nobody speaks for them and them alone – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own Parliaments, but not England.
So we polled 1020 English people (and we do mean English – we restricted responses to people who were both resident in England and were born there) about all kinds of things. Many were related to England’s relationship with Scotland and the rest of the UK, but while we were there we figured we might as well ask some other stuff too.
And as the UK parliament hotly debates Leveson 2 and press freedom in general, it seemed a pertinent time to re-ask a question which in polling invariably unites people of every colour, creed, class and persuasion across the entire UK, and which might be the only political policy anywhere in the UK which comes even close to matching the mass popularity of Scotland’s now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act.
It’s this one:
English people love the Queen, but not as much as they love this idea. Men, women, young, old, rich, poor, Tory, Labour, homeowner, tenant, worker, student, it makes no difference. Overwhelming majorities of every single demographic support putting an end to the ridiculous situation that newspapers can get away with blaring an untrue story all over the front page (and pages 2, 3, 4 and 5) in gigantic screaming type, and then print the correction in a microscopic corner of page 23 two months later.
It’s just about the only thing that totally unites Remain and Leave voters – our poll found identical responses (79% for, 5% against) among those who want Brexit and those who want to stay in the EU.
It’s simple, practical and costs nothing. We can’t for the life of us work out why nobody is prepared to offer it to the nation. If any party wants to actually win the next election, we’d suggest sticking it on the front of the manifesto and preparing for a landslide.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
