Wings Over Scotland

We’ve had extremely poor internet at Wings HQ since Thursday of last week, which our telecoms company is trying to get to the bottom of. (We’re typing this on an iPhone via very flaky 4G.)

We’ll be back with you ASAP. In the meantime, we’re being baffled by this assertion from the Financial Times that’s been doing the social-media rounds again recently.

Um, that isn’t “difficult” at all. That’s what maritime borders are for. That’s why the UK took the precaution of stealing (or reclaiming, depending on where you’re looking at it from) thousands of square miles of Scottish waters in 1999.

But other than any possible attempts to renegotiate that boundary, there’s nothing to debate. One side of the line is ours. The other side is yours. The end. We’re not at all sure why the FT would ever try to pretend otherwise.

Alert readers may recall as far back as November, when we ran an article on a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail hatchet job which claimed that “the SNP has squandered £2bn” in its ten years in office, but only actually listed around £800m in supposed waste.

The independent press regulator IPSO is still in a great big sulking strop with us for reasons we can’t remember, so rejects any complaints that come directly from Wings, but the good thing about having a 300,000-strong army of readers is that some kind soul will usually take on the task for us.

And this one turned out to be fascinating.

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Alert readers may recall some articles last August in which we highlighted the total pig’s breakfast Scotland’s media had made of reporting ScotRail punctuality figures, centred around mistaking the “on time” figures (trains arriving within 59 seconds of their scheduled time, ie at the advertised minute) for the “PPM” figures (trains arriving within five minutes) which are the basis of official punctuality targets.

Several newspapers, including the Herald, Courier, Daily Record and Daily Mail, had to publish corrections after our articles, so we can be pretty sure they won’t have made that mistake again with the latest stats.

Can’t we?

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The very strange man who is David Leask, chief reporter at the Herald, has been hard at work with a shovel ever since we ran a couple of stories on Monday.

Accusing this site of publishing “an implausible blog about our paper this week, based on some unchecked &, well, weird assumptions”, he curiously neglected to specify what those assumptions might have been, while embarking on a long, rambling and bewildering rant about what does and doesn’t constitute “fake news”.

Leask’s argument, at least in so far as we can make any sense of it at all, is that even deliberately and knowingly made-up lies printed in mainstream newspapers are not, and can never be, “fake news”.

That’s a term which he insists only applies to spoof sites pretending to be real news outlets, which we’d presume – although it’s by no means clear – means the likes of The Onion or the Daily Mash.

Which is an odd angle.

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December:

January:

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We thought it might be worth going through this in a bit more detail.

The phrase “out of control” is in quote marks in the Herald’s front-page headline, leading readers to believe someone has said it, but who? Let’s investigate.

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Call us cynical if you will, but we were very suspicious when we saw today’s Herald.

We were a little bit surprised that Oxfam would have commissioned a report into Scotland, so we thought we better check and see exactly what it said.

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Remarkably, the notoriously unreliable and yet somehow omnipresent Scottish political commentator and reality-disputer David “Davey” Torrance was still digging last night in the wake of this story from three days ago.

Never, eh? Let’s see if that’s true, shall we?

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Late last night in the House Of Commons saw one of the most significant votes in the history of UK constitutional politics. A group of Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose an amendment which would have protected the central building block of Scottish (and Welsh) devolution – the principle that any powers not explicitly reserved are devolved – from the UK government’s attempted huge power grab under the cover of Brexit.

Those very same Scottish Tory MPs had previously pledged to stand up for Scotland’s interests regardless of loyalty to their party, and had repeatedly expressed their grave disappointment at the deeply unsatisfactory condition of the Withdrawal Bill.

Last night they could have fixed it by supporting the amendment (backed by every other Scottish MP right across party lines), which would have tipped the arithmetic and ensured its success. Instead they betrayed every voter in Scotland – including their own – by waving the bill through unamended and passing the buck to the unelected House Of Lords, which has no representatives from Scotland’s most popular party.

This morning, BBC Scotland led on the fact that it snowed a bit in Scotland in January.

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The past week saw the return to the public eye of the former Independent columnist Johann Hari, who vanished in disgrace a few years ago in a plagiarism scandal over claiming to have done things that he hadn’t.

It also saw the return of ubiquitous Scottish politics scribe David Torrance from a trip to San Francisco, the details of which he shared at stultifying length with the unfortunate readers of The Scottish Review.

Or at least, what he SAID were the details of where he SAID he’d been.

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We’ve commented quite a few times in recent months about the Scottish media’s habit of running statistical stories rendered meaningless by the absence of any context.

The reasons for this aren’t necessarily sinister – sometimes journalists are just lazy or the full stats are hard to establish because like-for-like figures aren’t published – but usually it’s just a way to get an SNP BAD story out of isolated numbers which, if the full picture was presented, would render that impossible.

The above story from STV News today contains no furious rentaquotes from Labour or the Tories (at least not yet), so we should place it in the former category. Nevertheless, we do feel it’s our duty in a general sense to provide readers with the information that the Scottish media can’t be bothered to, so let’s do that.

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