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.
It’s been quite a 24 hours for watchers of the UK media. The Sunday papers saw two of the most demented rants to have been committed to print about Scottish politics since the independence referendum.
One came from Neil Oliver in the Sunday Times – painting a blood-curdling picture of a “second hate-fest” should Scots ever choose to debate the subject again – and the other from Leo McKinstry in the Sunday Express, beside itself with unhinged rage that Scots, having voted to remain in the UK, might exercise their right as UK citizens to also vote to remain in the EU.
(As a result of which we’ve concluded that a narrow rUK vote in favour of Leave being overturned by a huge margin in Scotland for Remain would be the funniest thing that had ever happened in British politics.)
They were joined this morning by David Torrance in the Herald wailing that “Scottish nationalists and Brexiteers have much in common. Both are utterly vacuous” (which readers might feel was a bit rich coming from the unchallenged master of vacuity) and blaming the parlous state of Scottish political discourse mainly on this site and the vile cartoonist Greg Moodie – along, of course, with the ever-dastardly SNP.
Such was the onslaught, in fact, that Fraser “I’d put £1000 on Ed Miliband to win the election” Nelson of the Spectator, of all people, turned up as the voice of reason.
We must confess, we don’t recall when this happened.
If anyone can help us out, please do.
Yesterday we noted that we still hadn’t received a reply to a complaint we made to the BBC about a false assertion by David Dimbleby on Question Time over six weeks ago, despite the fact that it’s only supposed to take 10 working days.
By coincidence we got the reply today, 36 days late, and it wasn’t worth the wait.
This evening’s Question Time saw one of the most incident-packed passages on the show in recent memory. From left to right onscreen the panellists were Paul Marshall (hedge fund manager, head of a chain of academy schools and co-author of the Lib Dems’ infamous “Orange Book”), Alex Salmond, Tory minister Greg Clark, Labour’s shadow home secretary Andy Burnham and right-wing think-tanker Jill Kirby.
We’ll let you watch for yourself.
We might just not post anything again until the second referendum.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
