Wings Over Scotland

To be honest, readers, this site isn’t very bothered about a bit of rudeness in politics. The sainted Aneurin Bevan, father of the NHS, once famously called the Tories “lower than vermin”, and his contemporary opponent Winston Churchill wasn’t averse to a few strong words either.

So long as nobody’s inciting violence, it’s our view that adults should be allowed to express dislike of each other in whatever terms they choose – at the end of the day, words are just sounds, and it’s absurdly irrational for a civilised species to arbitrarily pretend to take offence at the sounds “uck” or “unt” but not the sounds “urp” or “erk”.

So we’re not too fussed if dim-witted and boorish Conservative councillor Gordon McCaskill would “like to see” ISIS fanatics rape, behead or blow up Nicola Sturgeon. Unless he actively encourages or assists them to do it, he can think and say whatever he likes. That’s what free speech in a free country is supposed to be about. You don’t need to like something to defend it, as we demonstrated last week.

But our job is to monitor the media and the comical double standards thereof, and in particular the BBC, which is funded by taxpayers and which (unlike newspapers and other broadcasters) is supposed to be bound by law to impartiality and fairness.

And in the case of Cllr McCaskill, the leader of the Conservative group on East Renfrewshire Council who’s now been suspended by the Scottish Tories pending an investigation over his comments on Twitter on Monday, we suspect that alert readers won’t be entirely surprised by what we’ve observed.

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From a report on the BBC News website today:

But those sums don’t work, do they?

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We’re watching the Alistair Carmichael court hearing today. It’s monumentally boring, and likely to go on for much of today and tomorrow.

If you want to see for yourself it’s being broadcast on STV, BBC and Indy Live. But we really, really don’t advise it.

Summer is, as we’ve said before, the “silly season” for politics. Wings readers will have noticed that like everywhere else, we’ve been rather lighter on content than usual for the last three months as politicians celebrated their general election victories by giving themselves long holidays – sorry, “time for constituency work” – and in the absence of a referendum campaign to fill the gap there wasn’t much going on.

So we can’t blame the media for raking over old ground in search of anything to fill threadbare column inches with. But it’s less excusable when the things they choose to reheat, repackage and reissue are ancient, endlessly-disproven lies.

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Yesterday we noted an interesting apparent shift in the BBC’s political stance with regard to Scotland. Two serving senior political reporters have made open attacks on the SNP, backed up by other media and politicians, seemingly abandoning all notions of the impartiality to which the BBC is bound by charter.

(The Guardian’s hostile editorial was particularly bizarre, suggesting that devolving control of broadcasting in Scotland to Holyrood would turn the BBC into a mouthpiece of government, which inescapably suggests that the current Westminster-controlled BBC is a tool of either Labour or the Tories, depending which one is in power.)

This morning’s edition of The Times is the latest to join the offensive.

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This is quite an extraordinary thing to have happened.

But it’s not the only one.

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Particularly alert readers may recall that we recently made a simple and seemingly innocuous Freedom Of Information request for the latest viewing/listening figures of two BBC Scotland politics programmes (Scotland 2015 and Good Morning Scotland), which was met with the standard BBC “get lost” response to any uppity licence-fee payer with the temerity to ask about how their money’s being spent.

We appealed to the Information Commissioner, and we’ve just received a prompt, and impressively detailed and specific, reply. We attach it below for your enlightenment.

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For reasons best known to himself, and almost certainly NOT related to the recent publication of his new book, the BBC’s Nick Robinson has today chosen to reignite the issues surrounding his infamous questioning of Alex Salmond a week before last year’s independence referendum, claiming that the reaction to his presentation of the incident was reminiscent of “Putin’s Russia”.

The state broadcaster’s political correspondent then inflamed social media further by claiming on Twitter that a grassroots protest – neither instigated nor endorsed by the SNP or Yes Scotland – outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow a couple of days later was in fact organised by “a governing party”.

(Robinson also claimed the mob had been 4000-strong, although the BBC’s own report had put the figure at “up to 1000”. The demo was sedate and entirely peaceful – no arrests were made, nobody was hurt and no damage was caused.)

The footage showing that Robinson had lied on air about his encounter with Salmond was captured and published by this website, in a pair of videos which garnered well over 600,000 views on YouTube and one of the most-read posts in Wings history.

When we mentioned that fact earlier today, a reader asked what other posts were in the top 10. So we looked, and noticed that the biggest ones had a common theme.

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An update, then: as we write, our anti-poverty fundraiser (which set out to gather just £500 for a young woman in Kidderminster fined almost £330 for stealing a 75p pack of Mars bars out of desperate hunger after her benefits were sanctioned) stands at a phenomenal £14,395.

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There’s another rather bizarre Kenny Farquharson column in today’s Times. Under the headline “Holyrood wasn’t built for a one-party state”, it asserts that “the Scottish Parliament is no longer fit for purpose” on the grounds that the opposition parties are useless, as if that were the fault of the electoral system rather than their leaders.

After that, though, it just gets flat-out insulting.

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According to the Telegraph.

We’re not sure which one’s Michelle Mone.

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Unalert readers will have been startled to read in much of the media this morning – including a front-page piece on the Daily Record – of the “shocking” £100,000 cost of renaming the new Southern General hospital in Glasgow after the Queen.

That, of course, is because all the alert ones read it on Wings two days ago.

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