Wings Over Scotland

Part 1: the story.

This year’s Scottish Social Attitudes Survey has found, yet again, that Scottish people trust their government in Holyrood vastly more than they trust the one in Westminster. The figures transcend party loyalties, with far more people saying they trust the Scottish Government than vote for the SNP.

Trust in both governments was down by five points, which meant the Scottish Government had lost 7.6% of its trust (66 down to 61) while the UK government had lost 20% of its trust (25 down to 20).

Now let’s see how two newspapers owned by the same company reported the news.

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The Sunday Times puts some poll results in an interesting frame today:

And readers who’ve learned anything at all from this site over the last six years will be looking at that tweet and immediately wondering “what AREN’T we being told there?”

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Oh joy, it seems it’s time for the Scottish media’s annual cretinous non-story about the Scottish Government’s (entirely necessary and intrinsically unavoidable) “underspend”.

So as we’re busy today we’ll just refer you to some of the previous occasions we’ve covered it, because literally everything about it is exactly the same now as it was then.

See you same time next year, folks!

Although this site is blacklisted by the press regulator IPSO and therefore unable to file complaints about inaccurate and misleading newspaper articles, our alert readers sometimes pick up the baton from Wings articles and do the job themselves.

We reported one such example a week ago.

But the reader who took up that complaint has furnished us with a bit of interesting background to the story, and also news of a rather more alarming outcome.

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Because the World Cup starts today, and with these guys doing our job for us, we’re not really sure we need to be here.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.