Chris Deerin in this morning’s Daily Mail:
That’s okay, Chris. We’re embarrassed that you’re Scottish too.
We were considering having a day off today, readers. There’s absolutely nothing of any note happening in Scottish politics, and the papers have been reduced to scraping up all manner of barely-reheated leftover dregs to fill their pages.
But then someone drew our attention to something in Scotland On Sunday about the ongoing Women For Independence fiasco, and we were too annoyed to let it lie.
For reasons which defy all known science, John McTernan remains the first number on the BBC’s speed-dial list when they need a commentator to represent Labour views. It’s a remarkable editorial decision, given that McTernan despises the party’s current leadership almost beyond words, and it doesn’t seem too fond of him either.
But on today’s Good Morning Scotland, McTernan really kicked it up a notch.
We tweeted this yesterday:
Increasingly, the line between satire of the Scottish media and reality is non-existent.
The Daily Record has this on its front page today.
And that’s fine. The tale of a five-figure sum of money which might (or might not) have gone missing from the accounts of Women For Independence, who’ve promptly called the police to investigate an apparent discrepancy between their donated income and their expenditure, is entirely legitimate news.
But we couldn’t help wondering something.
This is John Humphreys on the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier this week:
And there’s only one small thing wrong with that.
Of course, that particular problem is easily solved. All the SNP needs to do is decide NOT to offer an alternative, at which point one will magically be created out of thin air.
A few weeks ago, we were told by a source that BBC Scotland’s flagship weeknight current-affairs show Scotland 2015 was recording some truly shocking viewing figures, in the region of 5,000 people a night. When we sent the BBC an FOI request for the stats, it was rejected, like almost all FOIs to the Corporation are.
We also looked into trying to get the data from BARB, but they weren’t very helpful either. So the only option we had left to get any sort of idea at all was to ask in our latest Panelbase poll.
When the results came in, we understood why the BBC wanted it kept quiet.
Below is an article taken from the UK media today about the Scotland Bill.
Give it a read through, and pay attention. There’ll be a very short quiz at the end.
We saw this tweet from Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson yesterday:
And we were quite confused.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
