Wings Over Scotland

Yesterday we noted that nothing had yet been heard from Scottish Labour’s policy review into universal services, launched amid much hoopla in September 2012 off the back of Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech.

The party has spent much of its time since then attacking the SNP over social justice, claiming that universal benefits are a middle-class subsidy, hurting the poor by spending money on giving the well-off free stuff they could afford to pay for.

Professor Arthur Midwinter, the Labour-friendly academic the party hired to lead the review, was widely reported by the press vowing to “devote at least two days a week for up to two years to prepare a series of reports for the commission, which is being co-chaired by Labour MP Cathy Jamieson and finance spokesman Ken Macintosh”.

Those two years have come and gone, and nearly six months more, and there’s been no sign of a single report from the commission. And it turns out there never will be.

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The categorical support of Andy Murray for Scottish independence, though only finally unambiguously revealed in today’s Sunday Times (the tennis star’s day-of-poll tweet backing Yes could by a strict semantic interpretation have been said to be somewhat equivocal), isn’t much of a surprise.

So it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the media told us.

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Perhaps we’re just being over-sensitive, readers, but we think the Daily Record might be a little bit upset with us.

That’s the editor of the semi-popular Scottish Labour fanzine, Murray Foote, pictured above this afternoon apparently issuing his own very special honours list, but it’s not the crankiest thing the Record’s published in the last 24 hours.

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Alert readers may recall that five weeks ago we pointed out a whole bunch of Scottish media outlets reporting as fact that Jim Murphy would definitely stand for the East Renfrewshire seat at May’s general election – despite Murphy having actually made no such announcement, just repeating his weeks-old fudge that he was currently the selected candidate.

Guess what’s happened today, folks?

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Please give as generously as you can, readers. It’ll really upset the Daily Record.

Click the image to go to the 2015 Wings fundraiser site.

Can you find the Daily Record’s prominent Smith Commission correction on the front page of its website today, readers? Take your time – it’s on there, we promise you.

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Sometimes a picture can say a lot more than a thousand words. Below, to the left of the vertical red line on our graphic, you can see the prominence that the Daily Record gave to their lies about “The Vow” and the Smith Commission report, which were found to be false by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

On the right of the line, at the same scale, is the prominence they gave to the truth.

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Well, now, there’s a thing.

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The comical furore about The Nurse Who Definitely Isn’t An Actress shows no signs of making sense any time soon.

24 hours and several demented pages of hysterical tabloid shrieking later, we’re still not sure whether a No activist and Labour supporter from Clackmannanshire is called Suzanne Duncan (as “Better Together” called her until at least June last year) or “Suzanne Hunter” (as the Daily Record calls her), though a bit of Facebook detective work suggests the latter.

We do at least seem to have cleared up her employment history, as the Daily Record has now very quietly and subtly changed its article of last night, which claimed she’d worked for eight years at a hospital that’s only been open for five.

But a whole bundle of other questions remain unanswered.

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You can never accuse the Scottish media of being knowingly underhysterical.

Tonight the Daily Record snuck out its semi-apology for telling the Scottish people the biggest lie we’ve seen on the front page of a newspaper since its parent the Mirror published fake pictures of soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners.

You can tell they’re not awfully pleased we forced them to make that “correction” by reporting the lie to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, because they even reference it in the editorial above.

Speaking of which – well, heck, where do we even start?

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The last few days have not been proud ones for the Scottish media. Following the Daily Record’s humiliation at the hands of the independent press standards body over the Smith Commission, we don’t see this letter from the chair of the Scottish Prison Officers Association in today’s Scotsman (and the article in question doesn’t appear to have been corrected), so it looks like we’re going to have to print it here.

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Alert readers should by now have spotted our story about the findings of the Independent Press Standards Organisation with regard to the Daily Record’s “The Vow Delivered” front page from last November. The paper was found by IPSO to have been guilty of “significantly misrepresent[ing] the fiscal consequences of the Smith Commission’s recommendations”, and ordered to publish a correction.

IPSO also noted in its judgement that the Record had amended the online version of the article accordingly. But that’s only partly true.

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