Wings Over Scotland

BBC Scotland is hosting a live TV debate tonight.

Despite having an even number of participants, the panel is split 3:1 in favour of Remain and 3:1 against independence (surely the biggest specifically Scottish issue likely to arise from the Brexit vote, and which several polls in the last couple of weeks now show is backed by a majority of voters).

Half of the debaters are also Labour politicians, which means that the third-placed party which got 22% of the vote in this May’s election has as much representation as two parties who got 69% between them.

We’ve been racking our brains for a couple of hours trying to work out a way in which such a multiply-skewed line-up could be justified (other than flat-out trolling), and we’ve got nothing. Does anyone have any ideas?

We know it’s early doors, but we’re going to state with some confidence now that this is the Tweet Of The Night:

Yes, that really is Tim Stanley, leader writer of the Telegraph, complaining about being up against the British establishment in a referendum. (In which Leave was supported by, among others, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Daily Express – the #1, #2, #4 and #6 best-selling newspapers in the country – along with around half of the MPs of the governing party.)

For extra fun, we might collect some of his indyref tweets later. But to the very best of our recollection, he didn’t consider the Yes campaign’s 45% – which really WAS achieved against the entire British establishment, without a single daily newspaper’s support – as a “moral victory”.

But, y’know, we’ll check.

Returning astronaut Tim Peake reveals the BBC’s new weather map.

(Chris Cairns will be back tomorrow.)

The man who last year wrote this:

…and in 2014 wrote this, today wrote this. We live in strange times.

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9 June 2016:

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Sometimes we feel as though dumbing down Scottish politics until the Times’ political reporter Kenny Farquharson can understand it is our full-time job. It’s something we have to do quite a lot, whether it’s reminding him what manifestos look like, or pointing out that protecting EVERY child in Scotland from harm is actually a good thing, or even basic stuff like explaining what the SNP’s position on Scottish independence is.

So we’re pretty used to this sort of thing by now.

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Yesterday we reported on a rather weird Scotland on Sunday poll that the newspaper reported last month, which pollster ICM seemed to want nothing to do with and whose results weren’t made public until weeks after they should have been, and only under sustained pressure from this website.

Here’s another extract from the paper’s coverage:

Now, that’s some pretty shabby and misleading editorialising right from the off by the paper’s super-Unionist political editor Tom Peterkin. The SNP had pledged to replace the tax in their 2007 manifesto, and attempted to do so as a minority administration, but were foiled by the combined opposition of the Unionist parties voting to block proposals for a local income tax. The Nats accepted defeat and the pledge wasn’t repeated in the 2011 or 2016 manifestos.

But the poll is even dodgier than that.

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It was revealed yesterday that NHS Scotland now has the highest staffing levels in its history, a positive story justly celebrated in today’s Times:

It’s in there if you read closely, honest.

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Alert readers may have noticed that we tend to slack off a bit at the weekend these days. There’s no point burning ourselves out with busywork at a time when there’s not very much going on in Scottish politics (certainly not in terms of independence, at any rate), and weekend traffic is always lower anyway.

So we’ve only just now got round to taking a proper look at something the online Yoon community and punditariat was getting itself very excited about on Saturday.

And it’s a fascinating piece of work.

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Readers, we’re honestly starting to believe that the entire Scottish media is some sort of elaborate Jeremy-Beadle-style prank.

Because the alternative – that they actually mean this stuff seriously – is just too bizarre and horrible to contemplate.

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You can almost physically feel it. Scotland’s opposition and media are absolutely champing at the bit today to try to make some “SNP BAD” political capital out of the tragic and appalling death of little Liam Fee at the monstrous hands of his mother and her grotesque, controlling partner.

Like kids at Christmas, some of them couldn’t even wait for morning.

But something odd struck us as we surveyed the coverage of the case: if the poor wee toddler had a Named Person, how come nobody could name them?

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