God bless our dear old pals at the Labour-fronted Tory money-sink that is Scotland In Union. Fresh from their latest stirring morning office singalong of “No Pope Of Rome”, they’ve decided to belatedly get in on the fact-checking game.
As the established force in the field, we had to have a look.
There’s a fascinating piece in the Guardian this morning.
It reveals that in attempting to solve the unsolvable Irish border problem, the EU’s Brexit negotiators are – at the UK’s behest – trying to come up with a plan which would preclude its use for Scotland in the event of independence.
That’s an entirely legitimate course of action. Having lacked the courage to establish itself as a nation, Scotland shouldn’t expect to be treated as one by either the EU or the UK (which has demonstrated its contempt by flatly refusing Scotland any voice in negotiations). The EU is quite properly, and admirably stoutly, defending the interests of its member state, Ireland. Would that Scotland had such clout.
But it’s worth taking a second to ponder what it all means.
Vince Cable, who was once apparently some sort of politician, took it upon himself to issue an opinion yesterday on the subject of referendums that had independence supporters on social media hooting with mocking laughter long into the night.
The estimable Wee Ginger Dug has already dealt adroitly with just the 300 or so most obviously ridiculous aspects of Cable’s tone-deaf and spectacularly hypocritical view, so we won’t step on his paws by repeating them here.
Instead we thought we’d do what we do best, and check the facts.
The Scottish Daily Mail fished this story out of the news toilet today:
So “man with major and important job gets paid the same rate for a full day’s work as Britain’s 800+ Lords and Ladies do for signing in for five minutes and then going home“ is apparently a shock-horror scoop now. But it gets better.
There’s not much going on in Scottish politics at the moment, but you know that when the media resorts to printing stuff from echo-skulled Tory mousewit Annie Wells, there can’t even have been any barrel left to scrape.
Grimly, the spelling in the headline is the LEAST embarrassing facet of the story.
Kenny McBride is a Wings reader. This is his personal experience and view.
A couple of weeks ago Ian Small, BBC Scotland’s Head of Public Policy, wrote an article for the Scotsman addressing the question of anti-independence bias at Pacific Quay. Naturally he defended the Corporation strongly, but he also made what seemed like an invitation:
“The issue over BBC content being posted online brought a further consequence, with over 200 people turning up at Pacific Quay in Glasgow last week to demonstrate against BBC bias. We offered to talk. That offer still stands. We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-making.”
I was sceptical, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I decided to act.
Last night we stumbled across an interesting little statistical wrinkle to our story from Wednesday about voters’ satisfaction with Scottish public services.
The middle set of figures there is especially revealing.
Chris McEleny is an SNP councillor. This is a personal opinion.
The open sewer of some newspapers has been in full torrent this week. However it surged over the overflow pipe with the hysteria in last weekend’s Sunday Mail.
In a deranged editorial it actually argued that Alex Salmond should stay out of the SNP “whatever happens with his legal challenge and the subsequent police investigation”.
In other words, “regardless of innocence or guilt, regardless of whether the procedures are judged just or unjust we just don’t like him”.
Actually it’s not what they like or don’t like. It’s fear that motivates much of the mainstream media against Salmond.
There’s a very weird story in the Scotsman today.
As alert readers will have noticed from the third paragraph, the headline is actually an inexplicably negative spin on the fact that journeys on the line INCREASED last year by 5.8% to a new record high of 1.5 million.
This year’s Scottish Household Survey is out, and the press is in an absolutely gleeful orgy of misery over it. Here’s the Times, for example:
The paper’s leading line is that “only half of those polled were happy with schools, the NHS and transport provision in their area”. So readers would naturally assume that the other half were DISsatisfied, right?
The reality is somewhat different.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of everyday non-constitutional Scottish politics is Labour’s constantly-recurring habit of highlighting some supposedly unsatisfactory statistic about the Scottish Government’s performance, only for it to be revealed that it’s vastly better than the comparable figure for Wales, where Labour has been in power ever since the Assembly was created in 1999.
So let’s crank up the machine again and see what it says, shall we?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
