We weren’t going to take Professor Adam Tomkins’ hysterical “NATMAGEDDON!” article for this week’s Spectator seriously enough to pull it apart line by line.
But once we’d wiped the tears from our eyes we thought we’d better do our job.
The comedy “obnoxious Tory” stereotype/respected BBC pundit (delete as applicable) Adam Tomkins has a dramatic opinion piece in the Spectator this week, which also commands the magazine’s front cover.
It’s a handy one-stop compilation of some of the most comprehensively-debunked Unionist myths and lies of the past couple of years, livened up for readers with some standard-issue wild-eyed frothing lunacy shrieking about one-party states, “Orwellian” dictatorships, the evil Nats are coming for your children, blah blah etc.
If we were to pull up every absurdly laughable line we’d be here all day, and nobody reads 5000-word articles, so we’re going to restrict ourselves to a single example.
As readers may have noticed, it’s been an extremely slow news week this week. The papers, having strung out the Michelle Thomson “crisis” beyond all endurance, have been reduced (in the case of today’s Daily Mail) to printing shock-horror pictures of her still sitting beside SNP MPs in the Commons, so little else is there to report.
(As far as we’re aware the Commons doesn’t have an official naughty step, so even if Thomson HAD been found guilty of doing anything wrong she’d have had to sit on the opposition benches just the same.)
But it seems the dastardly Nats have been getting up to something even worse than associating with a (currently) former colleague.
After we highlighted the ridiculous inconsistencies in press reports last week regarding Edinburgh MP Michelle Thomson’s business dealings with a couple in Cumbernauld, we’ve been in a lengthy dialogue with Sunday Mail editor Jim Wilson over the plainly utterly wrong claim in the latter paper that:
After we provided the Mail with documentary evidence of the sale price, we naively expected a tiny mealy-mouthed correction buried in a corner of this week’s edition. But what we got was something very substantially worse even than that.
The media seems to have more or less spent its load about Michelle Thomson for now. Having spent most of last week clutching at ever-more-tenuous straws to keep the story alive, it finally petered out over the weekend with a particularly desperate stab at reporting the SNP to the Electoral Commission over claims it worked too closely with Business For Scotland during the referendum campaign.
Triggered by a demented Nat-hating pet-shop manager who may be familiar to social media users for his overpowering obsession with both BFS and this site, it’s based on recent allegations from the Sunday Herald that SNP chief executive (and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband) Peter Murrell had expressed some opinions to BFS over their management, which have now been frantically spun up into a claim that the SNP and BFS were “co-operating” in the campaign.
This could in theory be the Electoral Commission’s business because there were rules governing spending limits which applied if two or more registered participants worked together. Scottish Labour have described the allegations as “hugely serious”, which cynical readers may feel is as good an indicator as any that they’re total horse parts.
The Electoral Commission appears to agree, telling the Herald that it “did not believe the revelations warranted an investigation”, but is obliged to look into the complaint anyway. We may be able to save them some time.
Kezia Dugdale made a spectacle of herself again at First Minister’s Questions earlier today. Using time intended for holding the Scottish Government to account over its devolved responsibilities, Dugdale once more decided instead to ignore her duty to the people of Scotland and attack the FM over a matter which is entirely outwith the Scottish Government’s control, namely the past actions of a Westminster MP.
Pausing only to demand that Holyrood interfere in the running of the independent Law Society, Dugdale then abandoned her casual endangerment of a live police inquiry by focusing instead on the morality of the aforementioned MP’s business practices:
But Ms Dugdale’s own ethics left a few things to be desired.
As life’s cruel weight bears increasingly down on your weary and creaking shoulders, readers – and it will, if it hasn’t already – you may find that you become decreasingly tolerant of those who waste your remaining time on Earth.
Certainly, this editor has rather less patience than he did in his youth, and engaged in a debate is often seen attempting to short-cut people’s outpourings of heartfelt rhetoric and hurry them along to their point, pleading “Yes, yes, all those awful things are awful but what is it you want to be actually done? What is your list of demands?”
It’s a phrase we’ve found in our minds a lot recently.
The media and Unionist politicians (we really need to come up with a word to describe that single entity), when not concocting hysterical frothing diatribes against Michelle Thomson or complaining about the Scottish Government giving money to T In The Park – a position we must confess we find ourselves in some sympathy with – have recently been loudly protesting about last year’s “underspend” in the Holyrood budget.
There’s an extremely good article here by Dr Craig Dalzell of the Scottish Greens dealing with the broader issue of why such complaints are idiotic, so rather than go over the ground again we thought we’d look at another angle.
We apologise for another post on the subject of The Wright House, everyone, but we do love getting our teeth into a puzzle, especially when it comes with a side order of lots of juicy evidence of the Scottish media telling people outright lies.
This should be the last one for the forseeable future, and we’ve actually got some solid info to impart this time rather than just a confused expression, so buckle up.
Even the alertest readers will probably already be confused by the baffling tale of Douglas and Jacqueline Wright, who sold their home to Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson. We certainly were last night, but on delving a little more into the media coverage of their story, things got a whole lot worse.
Older readers may remember an ITV show called The Krypton Factor, which had an “observation round” section in which contestants were shown a short video clip and then asked a series of questions about it.
Let’s play it now.
The newspaper is a fantastic concept. A cheap, accessible product, it’s a brilliant way of keeping yourself broadly abreast of current affairs. You turn a page and are presented with a diverse selection of interesting stories, often on subjects you’d never have thought to go and seek out in the self-refining echo chamber of the internet.
(Theoretically links on websites serve the same purpose, but dodging “sponsored” advertorial, gutter-level clickbait, pop-ups, autoplay video and pages that judder and leap around so much while loading all this rubbish that you’re about 50/50 to have an epileptic fit before you can read the story, has made clicking on one into a game of Russian Roulette fewer and fewer people are willing to take a chance on.)
This site has never believed that the ongoing steep decline in newspaper sales is a fundamental problem with the format. Rather, the truth is that people stop buying papers because they’re full of garbage.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
