Wings Over Scotland

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.

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Well, the timing of this is rather unfortunate.

If only someone had said something, eh?

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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the only political policy anywhere in the UK which comes even close to matching the mass popularity of Scotland’s now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act.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.

It has come to our attention that the Newsquest journalist David Leask spent all day yesterday issuing a long series of angry and rather insulting tweets asserting that this website had misidentified the nature of his employment in a number of articles.

Naturally, we wish to eradicate any uncertainty or possible errors.

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So it seems our article of earlier today rattled the Herald’s cage but good. Scottish political Twitter has been an absolute logjam of incandescent Herald Group hacks all afternoon, making all manner of wild accusations and threats. At the head of the fury, of course, was Chief Reporter And Witchfinder General Mr David Leask.

Unfamiliar with the Scottish media? God, how we wish THAT was true.

Leask issued a long (long) stream of invective on Twitter, while hiding behind a block that means we can’t post any responses to it that any of his Twitter followers will see. So for the record, we suppose we’ll have to address them here.

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Take a bow, Angela Haggerty of the Sunday Herald:

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Following the Scottish media’s week-long frenzy of stories about the “scandal” of baby boxes – in which it was revealed to the astonishment of the nation that cardboard is flammable and incapable of stopping an armoured assault from a tank division or a zombie plague – we were a little startled to note that the Guardian (which has now run THREE stories about how terrible it is to give babies nice free stuff) didn’t always have such a downer on the project.

Apparently (and as recently as this February) baby boxes are “great innovations” and “hugely popular” – so long as the SNP aren’t involved, of course, at which point they turn into grotesque deathtraps.

And it got us wondering: what else is only terrible when it happens in Scotland?

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We must admit, we didn’t think this would be beaten so soon.

But there you go. Just goes to show you how little we know about the sick, despicable, sewer-dredging shitfestival that is the Scottish media, and how badly even we’ve been overestimating their humanity all these years.

“Scandal”.

It says “scandal”.

To hell with every last one of these worthless sacks of parasitic filth. And their horses.

This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

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The Scottish Sunday Express yesterday had a shock-horror exposé about a “HUGE loophole” in the Scottish Government’s minimum-pricing legislation for alcohol.

We thought we’d give it a quick once-over. You’re in for a HUGE shock, readers.

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It’s not easy to type with your jaw on the floor, readers.

But in the six and a half years we’ve been watching the Scottish media here on Wings, this surely has to be an all-time low.

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Today’s Daily Record runs with a bizarre story lifted from yesterday’s Guardian, which resurrected the media’s longstanding but latterly-dormant hate campaign against the Scottish Government’s popular “baby box” initiative.

Universal free baby boxes have been used in Finland for the past 69 years with no negative consequences, and have indeed coincided with an absolutely enormous reduction in child mortality there. They’re being increasingly adopted all over the world, and are also sold commercially in the UK for up to £450.

Uniquely, however, in Scotland they’re bad.

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