Wings Over Scotland

In a month of positive statistics for Scotland – including unexpectedly high economic growth figures, continuing to lead the UK and hitting its own tough targets for hospital waiting times (which drew an incredibly petty and insulting response from Scottish Labour), and huge progress in rail punctuality (now also the best anywhere in the country) – perhaps the most welcome of all was the release yesterday of the lowest unemployment figures for quarter of a century.

(Again the best in the UK, and in fact the best in Scotland of all time, since separate Scottish records only started to be kept in 1992.)

The Scotsman commendably gave the glad tidings top billing on its front page.

But despite it being slow news season, the rest of the media was a little less excited.

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We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.

But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.

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“Colonel” Ruth Davidson took time out from her holidays yesterday to unleash an extraordinary (and unusually defensive) 35-part Twitter tirade about the reaction to her appointment as an honorary military commander. So barren is the summer political news desert that two newspapers put it on their front page today, giving the BBC an excuse to deem it the day’s biggest story.

But that wasn’t the bit that caught our eye.

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The term “fake news” has become somewhat devalued from overuse recently, and often translates simply to “news I disagree with or don’t like”. But this, from today’s Scottish Daily Mail, is a bona fide sighting:

Let’s just break that down.

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Here’s the doom-and-gloom front-page headline of the Herald today:

It refers to a new report from the Nuffield Trust called “Learning From NHS Scotland”. Its 61 pages contain precisely one mention of independence. Let’s see what it said.

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We’re always loath to criticise political journalists for feeble stories published during the summer season, when parliaments are in recess and there’s nothing much happening to fill space with. But the Sunday Post has started pretty early this year.

Let’s see if we can put a number on the degree of “dilution” here, shall we?

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Of all the tropes of the 2014 independence referendum, few were fought over more repeatedly and bitterly, or more dishonestly by the No campaign, than the saga of the Type 26 frigates. The UK government promised Clyde shipbuilders hit hard by years of neglect and job losses that it would build 13 of the state-of-the-art vessels at BAE’s Scotstoun yard, but only if Scots voted No.

Once that vote was secured the number very swiftly dropped to eight, accompanied by a whirlwind of misinformation insisting that there had in fact been no reduction. (As keen social media users will know, this brazen lie was pushed particularly hard by the militarist website UK Defence Journal.)

So we were interested to see a story in today’s Scotland On Sunday which showed how desperate the Unionist side is to cling on to the ships as a future blackmail tool.

The paper has chosen to present the news with a super-positive spin, as you can see from the headline. But the text of the article tells a very different story.

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…on last night’s article.

Because the Daily Mail isn’t standing for any of this confusion. It’s absolutely 100% clear that what’s happened is that the First Minister has U-turned and abandoned the prospect of a second independence referendum.

And also that she’s absolutely refused to do exactly that.

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The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.

Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.

(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)

But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.

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Brexit is already a shambles. Everyone south of Manchester is unhappy because it’s too suffocatingly hot to move, and everyone north of Manchester is unhappy because they’ve not got the sunshine. We could all, for various reasons, do with a chuckle.

So without further ado, readers, enjoy the “clueless metropolitan hacksplaining” hit of the summer: Kezia Dugdale, Comeback Queen.

Vote for the funniest line below.

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…which we felt it important to preserve for posterity lest anything happen to it. We’d charitably blame it all on the Telegraph, who made it, were it not for the fact that the Scottish Conservatives have posted it on their own Facebook page.

It’d be awfully embarrassing if they had a poorer-than-expected election result, eh?

…for one idiot and an occasional cartoonist talking to a country of only 4m adults.

And one of us DOESN’T EVEN LIVE THERE!!!!!

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