Wings Over Scotland

We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Below is a clip from last night’s Reporting Scotland. It features regular election loser Christine Jardine, an ex-BBC journalist who the Lib Dems have tried unsuccessfully for years to crowbar into Parliamentary seats all over Scotland (like Aberdeenshire East in 2016, Gordon in 2015, the European Parliament in 2014, Aberdeen Donside in 2013 and Inverness and Nairn in 2011).

She’s currently contesting Edinburgh West, which the party has some credible hopes of winning, having held the seat for almost 20 years prior to 2015. And it seems that her former employer has decided to try to give her a helping hand.

And, y’know, they’re really not allowed to do that.

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Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

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Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.

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The BBC has just published an article explaining its controversial claim that the SNP actually lost seats at last week’s council elections, despite going from 425 to 431. The analysis was carried out by Prof. David Denver of Lancaster University, and we’d asked him about it yesterday.

He’d very kindly sent us a copy of the same article he’d sent the Beeb. We attach it below. We’ve highlighted in bold the only bits that didn’t make it into the BBC piece.

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It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.

Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.

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With all 32 councils now having declared, the Scottish local elections are over and the SNP have won again, taking 431 seats. Last time round in 2012 they took 425.

You might think you know the difference between 431 and 425. But you don’t.

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Scottish schoolchildren start their exams today. We wish them good luck, because if any of them have taken their lead in language skills from the nation’s media they’re going to be in a lot of trouble.

For 10% of extra course credit, let’s find out why.

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We had to rub our eyes when we got up this morning, because we thought we must have opened the wrong issue of the Times tablet app by mistake – the lead Scotland story seemed to be a reprint of a piece from the previous day’s Sunday Times.

But we were wrong.

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We’ve never tried to put a precise breakdown on how much of the falsehood pumped out daily by the Scottish political media is due to deliberately misleading spin and how much of it is simply due to journalists who are really, really terrible at their jobs.

But there’s plenty of both in today’s Times.

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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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