Wings Over Scotland

The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.

First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:

This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.

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This month we’ve been noting a sudden avalanche of factually-questionable articles in the media attacking the SNP’s record in government. At the weekend and yesterday we also picked apart a highly misleading and disingenuous claim by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics that there had been no cuts to the Scottish Government budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

And today we can see why.

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The SNP MP for Dumfries and Galloway, Richard Arkless, made a post on Facebook last night in relation to this article in the Scottish Sunday Express three days ago.

You can read it below.

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Nation’s political journalists shocked.

More “news” at 1pm, 6pm, 10pm, 10.30pm, etc, etc, etc, etc.

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Angus Robertson won’t enjoy watching today’s Sunday Politics Scotland again:

But neither should Andrew Neil, because Andrew Neil was lying.

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We wonder how many papers we’ll see this in tomorrow.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

“Wright, 61, and husband Douglas sold their flat to Thomson and business partner Frank Gilbride for £21,000 because they wanted to sell quickly.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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