Wings Over Scotland

We apologise both for the slightly uncouth language in that headline and the mangling of an infamous phrase from the 1995 OJ Simpson murder trial.

But it’s hard to reasonably appraise the conduct of Scotland’s two supposed “quality” newspapers this weekend with regard to the Yes Scotland email hacking incident without using expletives, and that’s just about the mildest level of comment we could muster about the naked lies both have told the Scottish public.

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Herald View in the Sunday Herald, 24 November 2013:

“The geriatric forecasts of the IFS are surely a vision of Scotland if it stays in the UK. Without a new immigration policy and economic policies that keep skilled Scots families in Scotland, how can we avoid an ageing population?

Carwyn Jones has also joined the clamour for the Barnett Formula on Scottish public spending to be cut. The message is clear: within the union Scotland faces a future of public spending constraints, falling population and economic decline. Scottish representation in Westminster will likely be cut under the McKay Commission into the consequences of devolution.

The Scottish Parliament will have to pay its way by raising taxes in Scotland, without having access to oil revenues or the ability to legislate for growth. Scotland may be dragged out of Europe if it remains in the UK.

This is the off-the-peg future offered by the unionists. They’d better have a care: Scots might actually start listening to what they say.”

It’s nice to know that – finally – we’re not the only ones paying attention.

We’ve already had a message from the future today. Here’s one from 101 years ago.

Click to see the full story, and heed the tale well, jam-tomorrow fans.

Keen media watchers could have been forgiven for stifling a yawn this week as the Scottish press leapt eagerly on a think-tank report which bravely professed itself able to see no less than half a century into the future of the Scottish economy.

The Scotsman’s take was fairly typical. But it had a certain ring of deja vu.

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There’s a fascinating piece in today’s Daily Record about Andy Murray, and we’re not talking about the gormless expression Andrew Marr pulls in the accompanying photo.

It’s fascinating because it’s a gold-medal example of the art of reporting exclusively true facts while simultaneously saying flatly untrue things about them.

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I never understood why everyone hated Maggie Thatcher. Perhaps I was too young. Born in late 1980 I had no direct experience of the unemployment and closures of that decade, whilst the Poll Tax marchers were simply nuisance crowds who blocked the roads. Stuck on the No 14 on Argyle St, I just ate my Monster Munch and asked mum “Why aren’t we moving?” 

To me, Maggie was just a puppet on Spitting Image with mad eyes. She was funny, clubbing the other ones with her handbag. I never felt the hatred for her that everyone else in Scotland seemed to have. Even now – older and, dare I say it, well educated – I don’t hate her and just felt embarrassed by those morons whooping and jigging in George Square on the day of her funeral.

The rage of the 1980s simply passed me by. Thatcher and CND and the miners’ strike belong in the same distant era as Dexy’s Midnight Runners, The Young Ones and the Sinclair C5. So these days, you could forgive me for feeling a mite confused, because the 80s are here again. Only this time, there’s a much nastier sting.

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We’ve rather neglected the Crybaby Nation meme for a while. But as it approaches a year since the last time we wrote about it, perhaps it’s due for a revival.

Because it’s extra-specially dismal to see grown adults whimpering and whining like primary-school children in a playground when the Scottish press has spent most of the preceding weeks excitably hyping them as belligerent, aggressive “bruisers”.

Because in what appears to be part of a co-ordinated campaign of petted-lip clyping to teacher from the No camp, the latest middle-aged professional politician boo-hooing about “bullies” all over our newspapers and screens about people being mean to him is the new Secretary of State for Scotland, Alistair Carmichael.

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When an alert reader pointed us to a story yesterday in the comments, we were too busy to get round to covering it and now all the mainstream media has picked it up and we’re behind the times. But having looked at the media’s reporting of it, we couldn’t help noticing something strange.

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This site has been warning for a few months now of what lies in store for Scotland should its people vote No to independence in 2014, and in particular if Labour should defy the odds and win the 2015 general election.

Quite openly and in public, safe in the knowledge that the mainstream media (and most importantly the ever-loyal Daily Record) will ignore it, senior Scottish figures in Labour have said repeatedly that Scotland will receive a lower share of UK public spending, with the money being diverted to poor parts of England instead.

It turns out that we could have saved ourselves a load of analysis.

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TWO indy-positive stories in the Sunday Times? In the same week?

That needs preserving for posterity.

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It’s always nice when the Scottish media takes the time to illustrate one of our points for us. Earlier this week we attempted to distil this site’s core work of the last two years into two simple rules, elegantly pictured below.

Imagine our unrestricted delight, then, when this weekend’s Scotland On Sunday chose to generously provide us with some prima facie evidence of the phenomenon.

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We’ve only just realised that it’s our official second birthday today. (The technical one, ie when the site went live as a test with some old imported content, was last Friday, but we forgot to mark it, and today in 2011 is the day we published the first-ever post written specifically for Wings Over Scotland.)

In those two years we’ve published 1,680 posts including this one, and the thick end of a million words – 941,426 to be exact – by over 40 different authors. It’s a lot of stuff to take in, especially if you’re fairly new here. (Which you quite probably are, as nearly half of our 100,000+ readers have arrived in the last three months.)

So to mark the anniversary, we thought we’d see if we could distil most of what we’ve written in those 24 months down to just two iron rules, one for each year – in effect, producing a sort of user’s guide to the Scottish and UK media on the subject of Scottish politics, and in particular Scottish independence.

We think we’ve managed it.

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