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.
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.
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.
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?
There’s been a lot of chat on social media recently commenting on what seems to be a rather low-key approach to the Tory election fraud story.
Despite having the potential to cast the result of the UK general election into doubt, with dozens of Tory MPs under suspicion of being elected illegally, press coverage – particularly on the BBC – has been noticeably thin on the ground compared to, say, the days and weeks of sustained, new-content-free reporting on Michelle Thomson’s business affairs or Stewart Hosie and Angus MacNeil’s love lives.
(We learned very recently, of course, that the police still haven’t even spoken to Ms Thomson, over eight months after the allegations came to light.)
But even we were startled by this:
Yes, if you type “Tory election fraud” into the BBC website, the top result is for some unfathomable reason an article about Hosie and MacNeil, who are neither Tories nor under investigation for any kind of fraud.
Indeed, the current Tory election fraud story is nowhere to be found at all – the next most recent item on the page is from 2012 and about the Liberal Democrats.
We’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions.
These two stories today are based on the exact same quotes from the exact same interview in a magazine.
Thank goodness the press is here to interpret stuff for us, eh?
For much of its life, this site has been warning readers that, as their default position, they should always assume newspaper headlines are a lie until proven otherwise.
Today, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper admitted it in public.
Last night the Labour MSP James Kelly – who was resoundingly rejected by voters in Rutherglen earlier this month but was forced on the Scottish Parliament anyway by his party – appeared on Scotland Tonight to debate the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act. You can see the full segment from 15m 35s here.
Mr Kelly told a number of quite serious lies. We’ve edited them together.
Let’s examine them in turn.
We’re still on a break. But we’ve had another response from the BBC.
The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.
That was a quick switch.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
