Wings Over Scotland

Several right-wing media outlets, including the Scotsman, the Scottish Daily Mail and a far-right Unionist website called the Unity News Network have in recent days picked up on the findings of a newly-published study commissioned by the Scottish Government on young people’s attitudes towards immigration.

To give you a flavour of the Unity News Network, it was most recently seen making a Facebook post that captioned a fascinating colour video of London in 1924 with the words “Before Sadiq Khan, Before Terrorism, Before Acid Attacks, Before Moped Gangs, Before Mass Immigration…. Who wants Britain to go back to that time?”

(Some sample reader replies include: “How wonderful, we want our country back” and “It wasn’t the murder capital of the western world then I wonder why it changed was it a black cloud that descended on it?” For perspective on that claim, London recorded 80 murders in the first six months of 2018, compared to 141 in New York.)

And yet UNN still managed to put the least racist spin on the story.

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One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).

The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a single decade.

At the very least, then, you’d imagine that the period might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.

The like-for-like sales total of the same newspapers today is 492,353.

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Today’s Daily Record has a “shock” poll revealing what this site told you a week and a half ago – namely that just under half of Scots want a second referendum on Brexit. (Our Panelbase poll said 46%, the Record’s YouGov one says 48%.)

Amusingly, the paper describes this minority as “overwhelming support” for another vote, and runs an editorial leader demanding that Labour and the SNP unite to back such a proposal.

And, y’know, we may as well make the obvious point.

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It’s always nice to see Michelle Mone in the news again, especially when the Tory peer crowbars an attempted intervention into Scottish politics into everything she does.

And since there’s not much else going on, it seemed like a good excuse to have a wee delve into what she’s been up to lately.

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In the wake of this morning’s news that the Herald and Sunday Herald are to merge, we thought it’d be nice to remember the times – not SO long ago – when the paper used to do some proper journalism and there was some modest semblance of balance and professional integrity in the Scottish media.

Click the pics to enlarge as usual.

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In the continuing absence of any interesting current Scottish politics, we thought you might enjoy this Sunday Mail piece from exactly 11 years ago yesterday, confidently asserting that a quick chat would disabuse Scots of any notion of leaving the UK.

(Click the pic to enlarge.)

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Several of today’s Scottish newspapers report on a marginal increase in the number of homeless people in Scotland, and in particular – for some reason – those who’ve slept rough for at least one night in the three months before declaring themselves homeless.

Things become a little clearer when you see that the reported stats are courtesy of “research by Scottish Labour”, who’ve scoured the document to cherry-pick the worst-sounding numbers in order to blame “Tory and SNP austerity”, etc etc.

That weirdly specific stat for rough sleepers has risen by 10% over two years, although this year’s increase was only 1% and overall homelessness is only up by less than 1% over the same two-year period.

But all credit to Labour – it’s only taken them two months to come up with that number (which is the second line of Table 2 in the statistics). Because the figures were actually released – and reported – in the middle of June.

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Seriously, anyone got anything?

Scottish politics is still resolutely on holiday, but in response to an enquiry from Prof. Sir John Curtice today we noticed that we still hadn’t published a few snippets of data from our most recent Panelbase poll. So in the absence of anything else to talk about, we might as well have a wee look.

Our poll showed a strikingly large gulf in support for the EU between independence supporters and Unionists. Were there to be a second EU referendum tomorrow, Yes voters would choose remain by an enormous 36-point margin, and by well over two to one, whereas No voters were a much tighter eight points apart, with only barely over half plumping for Remain.

But even that overstates Unionists’ fondness for the European Union.

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Scotland On Sunday has a very odd front-page splash today.

In a truly remarkable feat of sheer journalistic incompetence, the paper’s Tom Peterkin manages to cover three pages discussing the idea of an independent Scotland renting the Faslane naval base to the UK without once even mentioning the two very recent opinion polls conducted on that exact subject, on both sides of what would in those circumstances be the international border.

But that’s not the weirdest bit.

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