Wings Over Scotland

Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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From here:

(NB These rules do not apply to Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, etc etc. Like, duh. In a properly democratic country we’d be able to use FOI to actually see the blacklist, but this is the BBC we’re talking about.)

Scotland’s political opposition and media, today:

There can surely be no country on Earth cursed and plagued with a more pathetic shower of petty, whining, gossiping harpies in those roles than Scotland. And while we knew that already, barely a day seems to go by without them reaching a new nadir.

If you’ve got the stomach to hear about the latest low point, grit your teeth, lower your expectations of humanity considerably and read on.

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Yes, we know the Express announces a “killer blow” to independence every couple of weeks. But otherwise we can think of nothing to add to this story, so just click the pic to read and enjoy.

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The accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers – last seen charging the taxpayer an eye-watering £20.4m for just eight weeks’ work during the collapse of Carillion – today published a report into the declining number of high-street retail outlets in the UK.

BBC Scotland was keen to put a regional slant on it.

According to the article, Scotland had put in the worst performance in the country. But that didn’t appear to be what the report said at all.

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The front page of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

The problem: it’s completely and utterly made up.

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This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:

As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.

But that wasn’t the weird bit.

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“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”

[click]

The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.

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Stuck for any actual news at the tail of the Easter weekend, today’s Scottish Daily Mail reaches once again into the bag marked “Emergency Barrel Scrapings” and comes up with that old faithful beloved of all newspapers, a shock-horror “OMG LOOK HOW EXPENSIVE THE TRAINS ARE!” story.

It’s always an easy hit – partly because since a shambolic, fragmented privatisation the UK does have pretty much the most expensive railways per mile in the civilised world, but also because regular train users tend to mainly travel in the same area all the time, and are easily persuaded that they have it worse than people anywhere else.

So let’s ignore all the Mail’s ridiculous cobblers blaming the SNP – who have very limited control over the fare policies of Abellio (the Dutch state-owned company who run ScotRail) and who have been prevented by successive UK governments from nationalising the network – and just see if that’s true.

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This is a grim and dispiriting time to be monitoring the Scottish political media, even by its normal low standards. So little is happening that Unionist newspapers desperate for any kind of SNP BAD story are scraping the residue from the scrapings from the barrel that they scraped away to splinters months ago.

A case in point is today’s FRONT-PAGE piece in the Herald containing the shocking revelation that someone connected with the SNP registered – in their own name, not even the party’s – an internet domain called organise.scot last summer.

Even though the domain is still unused eight months later and there isn’t a shred of evidence about what it might ever be used for, a couple of opposition benchwarmers speculating that a private individual registering a web domain must somehow prove that the sneaky SNP are plotting a new independence campaign was considered by the Herald to be not just news, but front-page news.

(It’ll certainly come as a massive shock to everyone in Scotland who assumed that the SNP had given up on seeking independence after pursuing it as their primary reason for existence for a mere 85 years or so.)

And alarmingly, it wasn’t even the stupidest piece of Nat-bashing to appear in the Scottish press in the last 48 hours.

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Remember that time, barely over a decade ago, when the readers of the Scottish Daily Express came out for independence despite national polls only showing support in the 20s, the paper sold over 80,000 copies a day (now just 38,000) and Severin Carrell of the Guardian reported that it was about to adopt independence as its official position?

(Which we don’t think ever actually happened.)

Because nothing is weirder than Scottish politics.

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We’re at the halfway point of our 2018 fundraiser, and the all-sources total so far is a thumpingly impressive £103,266 in just two weeks. But while that’s a tremendous sum, it’s sobering too.

Firstly because with an average monthly readership of  nearly 304,000 people it comes to an average contribution of slightly under 30p per reader. As with most crowdfunded ventures, fewer than 1% of the site’s users have actually backed it financially so far.

And secondly because for perspective, the average Scottish adult – independence supporters included – sends the BBC about £72 a year. (£323m from 4.5m adults.)

While obviously a minority of folk do boycott the licence fee, that still means that the average Wings reader gives the BBC 240 times as much money every year as they give Wings to fight it.

And as well as its own output, which is hugely financially incentivised in favour of the Union, the BBC is now using your money to directly fund Scottish newspapers hostile to independence by paying them to hire more reporters.

(It’ll then also massively amplify those hostile voices by featuring them on multiple daily “papers review” shows from which online media with readerships many times bigger are arbitrarily excluded, enabling the anti-independence outlets to dictate the political news agenda every day without having to sell a single copy.)

So, y’know, it’s a tough job.

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