Wings Over Scotland

The media is aflame today with the claim that Jim Murphy has finally ended weeks of speculation about whether he’ll stand again for his current Westminster seat of East Renfrewshire in the general election. Numerous sources including STV, the BBC, the Scotsman and Murphy’s local press have all announced unequivocally that the MP has confirmed his candidacy.

The only slight hitch is that he’s done absolutely no such thing.

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We’re a bit surprised The Sun managed to get an issue out at all today, to be honest. The editorial team must have been struggling to see through their tears of laughter after they managed to get two days of free publicity in every rival newspaper in the country and a ton of coverage from national broadcasters over a completely imaginary decision to stop featuring topless models on Page 3.

And they must have almost wept with the hilarity of getting The Guardian to line up a whole collection of its most pompous feminists to prematurely proclaim victory and parade some gloating triumphalism across several pages, before putting a winking Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth front and centre this morning and innocently pointing out that they’d never actually said anything so why was everyone acting so surprised?

Now, of course, every rival paper in the land will spend ANOTHER day or two talking about the sting, and The Sun will continue to roll on the floor and clutch its sides and get away with printing stuff like this:

And the thing is, nobody who looks like an idiot today will learn the lesson.

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Last week the SNP MSP Joan McAlpine – a figure often singled out for criticism by both Unionist parties and the media – came under fire once more for a column she’d written in the Daily Record, in which she questioned the motivations behind Labour’s desire to devolve more power away from the Scottish Parliament to local councils.

It’s a point this site was making as far back as 2012. Scottish Labour have given up on any hope of winning a Holyrood election in the forseeable future – the latest poll of Scottish Parliament voting intentions puts the SNP on over 50%, to Labour’s 26% – so the party has suddenly discovered a passion for local devolution that it oddly chose not to enact while it was in control at Holyrood for the best part of a decade.

But McAlpine’s point that Scots tend to trust the Scottish Parliament more than any other elected body was immediately misrepresented as an attack on hard-working and honest councillors. Yet the reality is that there’s an empirical measure of democratic accountability (and therefore trust), and it’s a measure in which Holyrood unarguably comes out on top.

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There’s a curious piece in today’s Herald, which we can’t be bothered linking to, in which ubiquitous pundit David Torrance makes a whole series of almost entirely inaccurate speculations about the motivations behind our Panelbase poll from last week. (Torrance, of course, is the commentator about whom Alex Salmond wrote an amusingly sarcastic letter to the same paper pointing out that despite appointing himself the former FM’s “biographer”, he didn’t know him at all.)

We didn’t announce beforehand that we were conducting the poll. Had we been greatly surprised or disappointed by its findings, we were under no obligation whatsoever to make all or any of them public. We could have cherry-picked only the ones we found most favourable to our cause – like the fact that Scots want to stay in Europe while the rest of the UK wants out – or simply pretended the whole thing never happened.

(The money was already spent. We don’t get a refund if we keep the results secret.)

David Torrance didn’t bother asking us why we’d commissioned the poll, but instead wrote a column based solely on his incorrect assumptions. Which is odd, as in so far as the very little we’ve conversed with him, we’ve done so cordially, and were happy to post him his own print edition of the Wee Blue Book when he asked last year, even despite past incidents like this.

We’ve always been happy to provide mainstream-media journalists with quotes when asked. So we’d just like to remind Mr Torrance that our Twitter account is here, our Facebook page is here, and our contact form is here. We’re not hard to reach. If he wants to know why we did something or what we think about anything, all he needs to do is drop us a line, rather than make stuff up and get it wrong.

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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