Wings Over Scotland

Most of the Scottish media today reports the latest Lord Ashcroft poll, which found Nicola Sturgeon to be by a distance the most popular political leader in Scotland.

“Scots feel quite positive about Sturgeon”, said the Daily Record, while the Scotsman headline was “Poll shows Scots approve of Sturgeon’s performance” and the Herald went with “Poll reveals strong support for Sturgeon”.

All three opened with almost identical paragraphs observing that the First Minister was the only UK politician to record a net positive approval rating in Scotland, putting her a thumping 32 points ahead of her nearest domestic rival.

The Scottish Daily Mail, though, had a slightly different take.

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Yesterday we noted that while Scotland’s opposition parties and Unionist media were united in the staunch belief that the Scottish Government should do something to improve the poorly-performing economy over which it has almost no control, none of them seemed able to offer so much as a single actual policy they wanted changed or implemented to this end.

Today the Daily Mail continued the attack at length:

So we thought we’d see if anyone had come up with anything yet.

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We’ve been trying to take advantage of the current lull in politics, with Holyrood in recess for Easter, to have a bit of a semi-break. Having to watch all the Unionist party conferences in March is always toxic to the soul, and with the gargantuan torrent of insane lies emanating from the indyref2 and Article 50 developments to deal with as well, this year’s was even grimmer than usual.

So when all the papers went heavy on this morning’s news that the Scottish economy had a slight retraction in the last quarter of 2016 and filled their pages with rentaquote drivel from the opposition parties about how it was all the SNP’s fault, our first instinct was to simply direct readers back to this piece from last October, detailing how the Scottish Government – by design – controls almost none of Scotland’s meaningful economic levers, and go to the movies again.

But then a headline in the Scotsman’s article changed our minds. Because we thought we should see which policies they actually wanted changed.

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Unionists were barely able to hide their excitement last month at the thought of some dead pensioners. This was former Labour MSP Dr Richard Simpson, for example:

(Simpson later went on to embellish the claim by saying that it had in fact reversed.)

The story was serious enough to be the Sunday Times Scotland front page lead.

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Actually, mighty King Leonidas is understating here. It was 311% in the end.

Wings Over Scotland 2017 fundraiser total: £140,047.

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Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 March 2017)
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We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.

Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.

It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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Normally the amateur blogger, unqualified would-be economist and unsuccessful dog-food salesman that BBC Scotland and the Daily Record employ on a regular basis to openly troll Yes voters restricts himself, when attacking this site, to crude abuse or smear and innuendo like the below, tweeted on Holocaust Memorial Day last year:

Last night, implausibly, he sank lower.

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There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.

It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.

Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.

And it’s not hard to see why.

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It seems counter-intuitive – given Rupert Murdoch’s often-overstated (despite endless and fevered speculation, the Scottish Sun didn’t back a Yes vote) but still seemingly real support for Scottish independence – that Sky News should be seen as the most hostile of the nation’s broadcasters to the Yes movement.

Yet such it is.

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The announcement that the Scottish Government would seek the uncontested legal right to hold a second independence referendum met with an outpouring of rage and ignorance from the massed ranks of the UK media that was in one sense entirely predictable yet still startling in its fury and ferocity.

Most prominent was the assertion, stated as fact by every pundit and broadcaster – including those required by law to be fair and impartial – that a second referendum would be conducted in the environment of a significantly worse economic case.

And that’s a remarkable claim, because the indisputable fact is that nobody has the slightest clue what the economic case for No will be.

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