Wings Over Scotland

We note with interest that the remarkable “I am not and have never been a Unionist” article about Jim Murphy, which vanished last night from the Daily Record website for several hours, has reappeared today. As far as we can see at a glance it’s the same as the original version with one slight alteration.

We’re not sure that was worth all the effort, lads. For most Scots, including a great many in the Labour Party, those are two interchangeable terms.

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In a publishing environment where newspaper sales right across both Scotland and the UK have been suffering an unbroken decline for several years, the news that the Sunday Herald – the only newspaper to declare support for independence before the referendum – actually managed to INCREASE its sales in 2014 by a whopping 31% after coming out for Yes is a striking story.

Here’s the headline the BBC chose to cover it under this morning.

Seems legit.

Jim Murphy didn’t turn up at Westminster today to vote with the Tories for £30bn of austerity cuts, like 28 of his Scottish Labour colleagues did. That’s because he was taking some Scottish journalists to lunch to explain an important thing to them.

We’ve been sat staring at a blank paragraph for the last 10 minutes trying to think of something satirical to say. We’ve got nothing, readers.

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It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.

Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?

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Pretty much the entire Scottish media yesterday carried a sad story about the funeral in Forfar of a young soldier who tragically died after serving in Afghanistan.

Private Mark Connolly wasn’t killed in combat but died after being punched by a comrade in a fight. Wrangling between his widow and mother had delayed his funeral for four years, and spilled over into angry confrontations as he was laid to rest, which the papers reported with considerable relish and plenty of photographs, and even video footage from the graveside.

The story was picked up in the Scotsman, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph’s Scotland section, STV News, BBC Scotland, the Courier and more. Curiously, though, one aspect of the unfortunate event was almost completely written out of the coverage.

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Below is a clip from today’s “Morning Call” on BBC Radio Scotland. Speaking (from 16m 24s on the full show) are SNP MSP Mark McDonald, presenter Kaye Adams and Labour MSP Lewis Macdonald. There are a couple of noteworthy moments.

A caller named “George” had rung in concerned that the SNP might be giving up on their goal of independence, and Adams invited Mark McDonald to set his mind at rest. Here’s what happened in the next three minutes.

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“Wait, this story’s entirely true. Do something, Torcuil.”

“Sorted, boss.”

It is, we’ve remarked before, often difficult to satirise Scottish Labour, because it’s hard to think of anything more fatuous, transparently hypocritical or just plain idiotic than the things they actually say for real. The party’s recent demand that the Scottish Government should set up a “resilience fund” to cushion the blow of falls in oil prices – or as everyone else on Earth usually calls it, an “oil fund” – is only the latest example.

There are just five months between the two tweets above. Yet Labour seemingly believes that the Scottish public will already have completely forgotten that the party spent most of the last two years telling Scots an oil fund was a mad, impossible idea.

But it’s even more ludicrous than it sounds.

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If twice is a coincidence and three times is a trend, then these five recent pictures of “Saint” Jim Murphy – the martyr who endured an egging for all our sins – from the print media surely tell us something interesting.

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We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.

Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.

That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.

And that matters more than you think it does.

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From last night’s actually rather good “2014 – The Rory Review”:

BBC Scotland has 1,250 staff and an annual budget of just over £100 million. Yikes. We’re going to need a bigger fundraiser.

Libby Brooks in today’s Guardian:

“The recently elected leader of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy, faces a daunting challenge to lift his party’s fortunes before next May’s general election as a poll shows support for Labour in Scotland is now half of that for the SNP.

A Survation poll for Monday’s Daily Record, the first to be released since Murphy’s election on 13 December, found that 48% of Scottish voters plan to support the SNP in May, and 24% Labour.

The swing implied by the figures suggests that as many 10 Labour seats [sic] could fall to the SNP.”

But that’s not what the figures suggest at all.

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