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.
We’ve noted on numerous occasions previously that one of this site’s prime functions is merely to remember things – to serve as a repository of fact which can be referred to when politicians or the media try to mislead people about what happened in the past. It was a thought we were struck by again on reading The Times this morning.
Because as we beheld Kenny Farquharson’s account of the SNP’s manifesto launch, and how its emphasis on the word “RE-ELECT” was unfamiliar and “very different” to their last Holyrood manifesto launch, we were sure that wasn’t how we recalled it.
So we checked.
The Sunday Herald, which enjoyed a major sales boost from being the first Scottish newspaper to officially back independence but has since seen its circulation increase partly eroded, has this morning chosen to throw a stick of dynamite onto the fire.
The paper’s front page today teases a double-page spread inside with the headline “SPECIAL REPORT: HOW INDEPENDENCE SUPPORTERS SHOULD USE THEIR SECOND VOTE”. And then things get a little strange.
Not so very long ago, someone said this:
Of course, it’s not that day any more.
SNP tax plans simultaneously raise £300m and lose £900m:
The Guardian’s daily sale in Scotland: 8,700 copies and falling.
It’s a rare occasion when we feel compelled to salute Scotland’s mainstream media, but their restraint on discovering that a whole slew of PFI schools commissioned by Labour might be in danger of falling down at any moment was highly commendable.
Restricting themselves merely to excising all mention of Labour from their coverage, the press admirably refused to somehow contort the issue into a shape that could be used to attack the SNP.
They kept temptation at bay for a solid 24 hours before they cracked.
Alert readers may recall that a few months ago the Scottish press got itself in a right old lather about a temporary closure of the Forth Road Bridge. The SNP were attacked relentlessly in the media for what a subsequent inquiry in fact found to have been an “unforeseeable” fault on the bridge which posed no risk to life. But fair enough.
This week, 17 schools in the Edinburgh area were closed down over fears that they might be unsafe after the wall of one of them fell off in high winds, two years after another wall in an Edinburgh school collapsed and killed a 12-year-old girl.
All 17 had been built under a controversial PFI scheme signed in 2001, when the UK government, Scottish Parliament and Edinburgh City Council were all controlled by Labour, and which isn’t due to be finally paid off for another 20 years.
You know where this is going, right?
The Scottish press and opposition’s incandescent and somewhat vague fury at the Scottish Government working to bring billions of pounds in investment to Scotland has continued undiminished in this weekend’s newspapers. Scottish Labour in particular are getting themselves very worked up about today’s Sunday Times.
“Incredible”? Sounds exciting. Let’s find out more.
Those of you who read our post of earlier today probably didn’t feel there was anything ambiguous going on in it. When Ruth Davidson intervened in an election debate to protest that the chair, the BBC’s Louise White, was being unfair to Nicola Sturgeon, it was pretty obvious who she meant, and White’s response removed any doubt.
Which makes this eye-witness account of the event, spotted by an alert reader this afternoon, odd in several ways.
Let’s count them up.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
