Wings Over Scotland

The popular children’s author and litigious bully JK Rowling, whose personal wealth is measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, has been devoting her time to the tricky task of finding people being rude on Twitter again.

In an attempt to prove that the independence referendum (described by the Scottish Police Federation as “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”) had been every bit as grotesque as the Brexit one which has seen an enormous rise in serious hate crimes in England and Wales – comprising thousands of incidents up to and including murder – Rowling had cherry-picked out a few unpleasant-sounding social-media comments and compiled them into a series of delightful collages.

(We’ll leave aside that calling someone “Yoontermensch” is a fair distance removed from smashing them in the face with a plank of wood in the street, say. Though we will, as is traditional, remind readers that every single recorded instance of physical violence during the indyref came from the No side that Rowling lavishly funded.)

One of the comments (visible in the top-right corner of Rowling’s composite image) came from the Twitter account of this site. And we thought it sounded a bit off, so we had a quick check to see if we’d really said something so mean.

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but party time‘s over.

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As several alert readers have already spotted, our Twitter account was suspended at some point in the early hours of this morning. We’ve had no email from Twitter offering any sort of explanation, but it seems most likely to have been at the behest of a Daily Express hack called Siobhan McFadyen who’s been huffily bleating to the company’s executives over the weekend about this tweet:

The reason we tweeted that comment is detailed here and here. But apparently it’s an opinion that you’re no longer allowed to have.

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We rarely do stat posts now, because readership has settled to a pretty steady level (generally bobbing between around 250,000 and 300,000 users a month) and we’ve run out of ways to blow our own trumpet. But we’re making an exception this month.

The snide, arrogant, pompous and casually factually-inaccurate comment above was made by a founder/editor of a rather less popular Scottish political website. And in the (statistically unlikely) event that you happened to read it and became concerned, we thought you’d like a little more information about our “ever-decreasing readership”.

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Below is a very interesting 13-minute chat from this afternoon’s John Beattie Show on Radio Scotland, also featuring Stuart Cosgrove (presenter of the excellent footy prog Off The Ball) and Eamonn O’Neill, who we presume is this Eamonn O’Neill.

(The John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 December 2015)
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Naturally we like it because there’s mention of Wings, which – for just about the first time we can recall on broadcast media in our four-year life – isn’t about how vile and awful we are, but the whole thing is much more wide-ranging and well worth a listen.

(The line “The media the media doesn’t like to talk about” is Beattie’s, not ours.)

So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

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Another three months have come and gone – where does the time get to, eh? – so it’s time for a quick Wings readership-stats update. There’s nothing particularly interesting or dramatic about them, so we’ll just give you the numbers and move on.

UNIQUE VISITORS IN OCTOBER 2015: 293,793
PAGE VIEWS: 4,616,334

In what’s been mostly a very sleepy time for politics, we’re thrilled with that.

Alert readers of The National will have noticed an article by me in it today. It reads slightly weirdly, jumping from subject to subject, because it was originally done as an interview but they then decided to cut the questions out to get more text in.

That’s all absolutely fine – they okayed it with me first – but some readers may be interested in seeing the full original piece, which is about twice as long. If you are, you can read it below. If you’re not, um, do what you like. I’m not your mum.

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Nobody else is going to do this, so we’ll do it ourselves.

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For reasons best known to himself, and almost certainly NOT related to the recent publication of his new book, the BBC’s Nick Robinson has today chosen to reignite the issues surrounding his infamous questioning of Alex Salmond a week before last year’s independence referendum, claiming that the reaction to his presentation of the incident was reminiscent of “Putin’s Russia”.

The state broadcaster’s political correspondent then inflamed social media further by claiming on Twitter that a grassroots protest – neither instigated nor endorsed by the SNP or Yes Scotland – outside BBC Scotland’s headquarters in Glasgow a couple of days later was in fact organised by “a governing party”.

(Robinson also claimed the mob had been 4000-strong, although the BBC’s own report had put the figure at “up to 1000”. The demo was sedate and entirely peaceful – no arrests were made, nobody was hurt and no damage was caused.)

The footage showing that Robinson had lied on air about his encounter with Salmond was captured and published by this website, in a pair of videos which garnered well over 600,000 views on YouTube and one of the most-read posts in Wings history.

When we mentioned that fact earlier today, a reader asked what other posts were in the top 10. So we looked, and noticed that the biggest ones had a common theme.

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It’s three months since our last traffic-stats update, so we’re due again.

WINGS OVER SCOTLAND JULY 2015

Unique users: 308,314
(up 20,626 on June 2015, up 79,159 on July 2014)

Visits: 1,147,571
(up 90,453 on June 2015, up 229,604 on July 2014)

Page views: 4,732,038
(up 94,495 on June 2015, up 498,717 on July 2014)

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We’re not due a traffic post this month, so we’ll just leave this here.

(From a new Panelbase poll. More findings coming soon.)

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