Wings Over Scotland

There’s a truly abominable piece of hatemongering in today’s Times. A grotesequely dishonest Nat-bashing smear job based on stupendously misrepresented fragments of quotes, it’s penned by Patrick Harkness, someone who the paper identifies as “a past co-chairman of the RSE [Royal Society of Edinburgh] Young Academy of Scotland”.

For some reason it’s chosen to leave a few lines off his CV.

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Alert readers will of course be aware that a recurring theme on this site is looking for the alleged abusive behaviour by supporters of independence which gets regularly reported in outraged terms by newspapers but is mysteriously almost never supported by any actual evidence of the supposed abuse.

Case studies are almost endless – Labour MSP Cara Hilton, sort-of comedian Susan Calman, historian and hairdressing disaster model Neil Oliver, Scottish Labour shadow cabinet member ordinary mother Claire Lally, nurse/actress Suzanne Duncan/Hunter, popular Olympian cyclist Chris Hoy, currently-resting pop singer David Bowie, tanktop enthusiast and Weetabix impersonator David Torrance, we could go on.

In every case the papers and/or alleged recipients of all these dreadful separatist haranguings screamed “VILE ABUSE!”, swooning at the horror of it all, then suddenly turned deaf and dumb when asked to provide any examples.

So we were quite surprised yesterday when a previous complainant – brutal stickering victim and lonely Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray – actually came up with the proof.

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We weren’t sure we’d woken up properly when we read this morning’s Times.

“Much-trumpeted”? That’s, um, not quite how we remember things.

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Five minutes and 51 seconds, to be precise, is how long David Mundell, Secretary of State for Scotland, spent frantically quacking out meaningless noise on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland in order to avoid answering a simple Yes/No question until the interview ran out of airtime.

We could quibble with presenter Gordon Brewer making the assertion that a Section 30 order would in fact be necessary for a second referendum (something which has never been established in law or conceded by the Scottish Government, with strong and genuine legal opinion on both sides of the argument), and with him letting Mundell get away with the blatant falsehood that an overwhelming majority of Scots don’t want another referendum – in fact, 50% want one within the next two years.

But sometimes you have to let some smaller things slide to avoid distraction and stay focused on your main point, and in our view this was one of those occasions.

An exchange from Twitter this morning:

Should we check out that link and find out whether the then-FM really DID “claim that the Scottish NHS would be privatised if Scots voted No”, readers? Let’s do!

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The most overused political insult du jour is for people to accuse each other of dealing in “fake news” and “alternative facts”. Normally, of course, they’re referring to dodgy memes on social media or the latest mad yelping from Donald Trump or his minions.

But in Scotland, our fake news is in the real newspapers.

Pretty much every day of every week of every year.

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Readers familiar with our standing advice to newspaper customers that the headline is nearly always a lie might like to consider today’s Press & Journal.

The word “pyre” comes from the Greek word “pyra”, meaning “fire”. Surprisingly, it’s NOT the same root as “Pyrrhic”, as in “Pyrrhic victory”, meaning one that’s achieved by metaphorically burning your own city down. (Which in fact is named after the Greek general Pyrrhus of Epirus.)

But why the etymology lesson?

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The Sunday Herald ran an extraordinary article on page 2 yesterday, and by the time we’d finished being startled by what nonsense it was, it set us wondering about why.

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Here’s Alex Salmond on last night’s Newsnight:

Let’s just quickly fact-check that claim.

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We followed with interest an exchange over the weekend between Times columnist Kenny Farquharson and the anti-Brexit QC Jolyon Maugham, regarding the difference between the UK government’s insistence that there won’t be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because of the UK leaving the EU, and its continued insistence that there WOULD have to be one between the rUK and an independent Scotland, despite the legal circumstances being indistinguishable.

Farquharson, who like much of the Scottish political commentariat clings doggedly to the implausible dream of a “federal” UK, was adamant that the rules would – and indeed that they should – be different for the two ostensibly identical situations, and his given reason was a deeply disturbing one.

Kenny, it seems, thinks Scottish nationalists should do a lot more murdering.

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Actual Scottish politics news continues to be thinner on the ground than the crowds at a Donald Trump inauguration, so we sympathise once more with the gentle souls of the Scottish press as they endeavour to fill empty pages without doing anything more journalistically strenuous than slightly rewording a Labour or Tory press release.

Fortunately for us, of course, we’ve always got their dismal efforts to talk about.

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Alert readers may recall as far back as July of last year, when we highlighted an odd thing that Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale had started saying.

Regardless of the fact that it was total hooey, Dugdale repeated it every chance she got, and the inevitable Scottish-media consequences have duly followed.

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