Wings Over Scotland

On Wednesday we highlighted a curious outbreak of mass hysteria in the Scottish press, when a whole clutch of its newspapers suddenly and inexplicably jumped on a six-month-old story that had been comprehensively debunked at the time and hadn’t become any more true.

The story was swiftly proven to be complete rubbish all over again, and some of the papers printed grudging and much less prominent pieces admitting it was nonsense (all gallantly blaming their source, some Buckingham Palace flunky gone rogue, rather than their own failure to check the facts).

And then things got weird.

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We’ve noted on more than one occasion that the spectacular SNP surge since the referendum appears to have completely unhinged much of the Scottish and UK press. Having pumped out a vast avalanche of hysterical coverage which utterly failed to stop the Scottish electorate returning 56 SNPs out of 59, the papers have responded to the rebuff by simply turning the volume up.

But even by those standards, today has been special.

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The Mirror, the Daily Record and Scottish Labour are currently working themselves up into a shrieking froth about the SNP’s supposed plans to “privatise” the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry services to the Western Isles, which are due to be put out to tender again for the first time since the SNP took control of Holyrood in 2007.

It’s just possible there may be some hypocrisy on show.

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A casual observer might perhaps wonder if JK Rowling, no longer writing books about wizards for children, simply wants to be noticed.

Twice in the space of a few weeks she’s appeared on newspaper front pages bleating piously about the terrible hordes of cyber- and other-nats. Yesterday the Independent, Telegraph, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record and more all ran dismal, whiny pieces about her (entirely evidence-free) claims that the SNP was infested with mad, bitter Anglophobes just waiting for a signal to invade Derby again or something.

No particular barrage of abuse appears to have been unleashed upon the former author to provoke the outburst, but seemingly for a lack of anything better to do with her time she had a good old moan anyway and the press lapped it up.

And the reason it’s all so very tedious is that the papers might as well run stories claiming that there’s a chance of rain tomorrow.

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Over and over again in the years leading up to the independence referendum, Scots were warned of the many dire consequences of voting Yes. Among the No campaign’s prime targets for scare tactics were subsidies for renewable energy.

UK government subsidies drying up certainly sounded like a scary prospect.

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On the day Jim Murphy stands down as leader of the Labour Party North Britain branch office, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer our humble, heartfelt tribute to both him and the insightful political commentariat of Scotland.

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Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:

The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.

Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.

(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)

A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.

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24 hours in news:

Oil is good again! Yay!

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We’ve already brought you the First Minister’s appearance on last night’s The Daily Show in the US, but in addition to the seven minutes that were shown on TV there were a further seven minutes of interview which didn’t go out on air, but were shown on the Comedy Central website, region-blocked so only US residents could see them.

When the FM goes abroad to represent Scotland in the outside world, though, we think it’s only fair that Scots get to see what she’s saying and doing on their behalf, so we didn’t let such trifling obstacles get in our way.

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The First Minister’s appearance on The Daily Show last night in full:

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The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.

Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.

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The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.

There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).

We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.

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