Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour won a council by-election in Fife last night, held after the long-serving Communist Party/independent councillor Willie Clarke (who can be seen on the last page of our Charlie Hebdo feature here) stepped down due to ill health.

The successful candidate Mary Lockhart was understandably jubilant, but there were a couple of what seemed like pertinent facts missing from the local paper’s report.

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The new January-June 2016 sales figures for “regional” Scottish newspapers:

Aberdeen Evening Express: 27,441 copies per day (-11.3% vs Jan-Jun 2015)
Dundee Courier: 41,243 (-8.5%)
Dundee Evening Telegraph: 16,354 (-9.5%)
Edinburgh Evening News: 20,235 (-14.1%)
Glasgow Evening Times: 25,679 (-14.3%)
The Herald: 30,402 (-11.6%)
Paisley Daily Express: 4,986 (-7.4%)
The Press & Journal: 54,270 (-7.2%)
Scotland On Sunday: 19,059 (-21.1%)
The Scotsman: 20,304 (-14.6%)
Sunday Herald: 21,613 (-25.5%)

Posted without comment.

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One thing you can always guarantee on GERS Day is that the latest set of figures for Scotland’s devolved economy inside the UK will trigger another uncontrolled spurt of “SNP HONEYMOON OVER” articles from the nation’s dogged commentariat.

Today we’ve seen already examples (links below) from two ex-Scotsman editors, Iain Martin and Magnus Linklater, the latter popping up in the Times by way of a rather crass and unpleasant analogy involving Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts.

And since we’d rather watch “Suicide Squad” again than spend any more time going over the arguments about GERS (and trust us, readers, we don’t say that lightly), we thought it’d be more fun if we finally got round to compiling a semi-definitive list of all the times the collective wisdom of Scotland’s media and opposition has confidently predicted the SNP’s imminent demise.

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“Black hole” grows by £2.4bn in the space of four minutes:

Hopefully we’ll soon have the sort of totally definitive clarity we got last time.

“CRISIS-HIT POLICE TO AXE 300 OFFICERS”, blares the front-page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail. (Along with some exciting Prince Harry not-news.)

“SECRET cuts to police numbers will see hundreds of officers axed as the single force faces a deepening cash crisis. The Mail can reveal controversial proposals to reduce frontline manpower – while violent and sex crimes are increasing”, it continues.

So let’s see what this worrying-sounding story actually DOES reveal.

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The BBC’s most prominent politics presenter Andrew Neil, today:

There is, as there is so often, just one small problem.

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Today’s Sunday Times didn’t bother with any subtlety in its signalling of how people should expect the Scottish media to handle next week’s GERS figures.

So we’ll just leave these here:

The limitations of GERS

The five key facts about GERS

The wishful believers

Gazing into the black hole

There’ll be nothing but repeats of all last year’s articles in the papers, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in re-writing all the rebuttals. We’d advise readers not to expect to hear any of the facts or arguments in any of the above articles aired on TV or radio discussions of the new figures either. For the sake of your blood pressure, it’s probably best to stick to old QI repeats on Dave for the next eight days.

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For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.

The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.

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The Scottish media has worked itself into an indignant froth over the last few days about the appearance of Sputnik News – an Edinburgh-based arm of a publicly-owned, state-run Russian news agency, fronted by (among others) former Dateline Scotland and NewsShaft stars Jack Foster and Carolyn Scott.

(Any resemblance to publicly-owned, state-run national news agencies of questionable impartiality in other countries is of course entirely coincidental and totally different.)

The Sunday Herald ran a bizarre smear piece yesterday on the pair’s past fundraising initiatives for their two previous projects (which were obviously completely unrelated to Sputnik), and today’s Times has an even weirder column by Melanie Reid in which Foster and Scott are directly and startlingly compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

We tried, for the purposes of satire, to think of another country that played host to nuclear missiles that were controversially imposed on it by an external government, but unfortunately we couldn’t come up with anything. Sorry about that.

No, we’re not referring to the Spectator’s awful reheated whine from super-Unionist composer Sir James Macmillan, Knight Commander Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire, in which he takes the audacious step of accusing some OTHER artistes of cravenly kowtowing to the establishment.

(A complaint he’s been levelling for several years in any publication that’ll listen, and which today’s piece hasn’t bothered to update with any post-2014 examples.)

We’re actually talking about this:

Because this one’s even older.

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This morning’s SNP BAD piece in the Herald has undergone a slight change in tone since we wrote about it.

We’ll just assume that a small pang of conscience overcame someone.

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There’s a story in today’s Herald about yet another SNP disaster:

Backfires? What, the fares have gone UP?

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