Waking up bleary-eyed this morning at 6.45am, we reached over to switch on Good Morning Scotland, just in time for the news headlines round-up. This is what we heard:
We honestly thought in our semi-awake state we might have dreamed it.
We’re sure we’re not the only people for whom the hours are dragging and we wish the election would just hurry up and get here, but all the same we’re pretty sure that if there were 11 days left to save the UK on Sunday morning, then by Tuesday morning there should be fewer than 10 still to go.
If you’re trying to give someone an example of a terrible group of people from history, I think the Nazis are pretty good for that purpose. They fulfil the criterion excellently, what with all the invading and occupying and repression and genocidal murder and everything, and there’s very little ambiguity or any shades of grey about their evil.
Now, alert readers may have spotted that while the headline of this article is a genuine quote from the paragraph above, and could be technically correctly described as my words by someone with malicious and dishonest intent (something which does in fact happen regularly), it gives a highly misleading impression of what was really said.
And with that, welcome to the Scottish media.
You might not think it, readers, but even after all this time we’re still capable of a certain degree of innocent, naive trust in Scottish journalism.
When Nicola Sturgeon didn’t just issue a boilerplate condemnation at FMQs yesterday after ludicrously overblown allegations of Twitter “trolling” by an SNP candidate, but went on the counter-attack over Labour’s grotesquely abusive Ian Smart, we foolishly thought that might make both sides of the story newsworthy.
And then we opened the papers.
We don’t expect the media to be impartial. But let there today officially be an end to even the slightest pretence that it’s at least fair, professional and honest.
Earlier today we highlighted some of the social-media charm of Labour blogger and BBC pundit Ian Smart, after the Scottish branch office deputy leader Kezia Dugdale demanded that the First Minister should take a more pro-active role in policing the comments of party members on Twitter and Facebook.
Mr Smart’s history of incredibly abusive and offensive comments stretches back many years. But of course, it wouldn’t be reasonable to berate Scottish Labour for its failure to act if it wasn’t aware of them. So we had a trawl through his Twitter followers list just to see if there was anyone who might have noticed and brought it to the leadership’s attention so they could have a quiet word.
It’s another tumultuous Jim Murphy Rally, readers!
We’re just putting this shot of today’s brief Edinburgh gathering (from Isabel Hardman of the Spectator) here for the record, so people can compare it with the footage and images that appear on tonight’s news bulletins and tomorrow’s newspapers.
If you thought the right-wing press was having paroxysms at the weekend, readers, you’re going to love what they had lined up for the day of the SNP manifesto launch.
Let’s have a little tour of the London newsrooms, shall we?
Impressive as it is in a party with Jackie Baillie in it, Kezia Dugdale has carved out quite a reputation in Scottish Labour as a specialist in making categorical statements of facts which turn out not to be true. So we were naturally sceptical when she claimed on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland that Stewart Hosie of the SNP hadn’t said whether a commitment to a second independence referendum would be in tomorrow’s SNP manifesto.
We thought that he had, and so did presenter Gordon Brewer, but Dugdale was most adamant – “I listened VERY carefully, very carefully indeed” – that he’d “dodged and dived” on the matter, and spent more than a minute of her interview saying so.
So we went back and checked, because that’s what we do.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
