Wings Over Scotland

This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

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The Scottish Sunday Express yesterday had a shock-horror exposé about a “HUGE loophole” in the Scottish Government’s minimum-pricing legislation for alcohol.

We thought we’d give it a quick once-over. You’re in for a HUGE shock, readers.

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It’s not easy to type with your jaw on the floor, readers.

But in the six and a half years we’ve been watching the Scottish media here on Wings, this surely has to be an all-time low.

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Today’s Daily Record runs with a bizarre story lifted from yesterday’s Guardian, which resurrected the media’s longstanding but latterly-dormant hate campaign against the Scottish Government’s popular “baby box” initiative.

Universal free baby boxes have been used in Finland for the past 69 years with no negative consequences, and have indeed coincided with an absolutely enormous reduction in child mortality there. They’re being increasingly adopted all over the world, and are also sold commercially in the UK for up to £450.

Uniquely, however, in Scotland they’re bad.

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We apologise if any readers were inadvertently given a misleading impression by any of these headlines, stories or claims.

The correct version of the report is below.

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We weren’t going to do anything on yesterday’s disturbing development in the legal wrangle between the Scottish and UK governments over devolved powers and Brexit, because the rest of the media has been covering it at length and we don’t have any particular expertise or insight to offer.

But it was hard to ignore the striking turn of phrase used, not by some sensationalist partisan commentator but by the learned and sober QC Jonathan Mitchell, last seen acting for the petitioners in the Alistair Carmichael lie case.

It doesn’t pull any punches, but as a summary of the relationship London wants to put in place between itself and the devolved nations for years to come (Labour-run Wales has already caved), and which Unionist politicians and the more witless pundits are of course portraying as unreasonable grievance-mongering and failure on the part of the Scottish Government, it’s about as accurate a description as you’re ever going to find.

Alert readers may recall that the Electoral Commission recently chose, to everyone’s (cough) great surprise, to take no action against extremist Unionist shout-monkeys Scotland In Union over a number of clear breaches of electoral rules, or for failing to disclose a number of large donations from extremely wealthy donors.

10 days ago the EC published a tranche of FOI documents relating to the case on its website, with the donor details redacted to protect the identity of the various Lords, Dukes, Earls and Countesses who’d rather you didn’t know that they’d been handing thousands of pounds at a time to SiU.

Or at least, sort of redacted.

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As alert readers will recall, nowadays we only look at the Scottish Daily Express if we’re absolutely desperate for material, so this piece slipped past us a few days ago:

And since the only thing in the papers today is page after page of unbearable fawning drivel about the stupendously insignificant (fifth in line to the throne, will never ever be king unless a terrorist blows up Buckingham Palace with an atomic bomb, is roughly as important to the wellbeing of the nation as Hamilton Accies’ third-choice goalkeeper) royal baby, we figured we may as well have a look at it now.

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A beginner’s guide to how it works:

SUNDAY: The Sunday Times copies an SNP BAD nonsense story wholesale from the previous day’s Scottish Daily Mail.

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Even in a sluggish news season, it’s somehow extra-dispiriting to see a once-august newspaper like the Sunday Times fill its pages by trying to flog its readers reheated old cobblers from the previous day’s Daily Mail.

We’ve already shredded the towering stupidity of the story itself (the Times dutifully repeats all the exact same drivel about meal deals and loyalty vouchers), so we were pleased when social media presented a new angle on it.

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Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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From here:

(NB These rules do not apply to Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, etc etc. Like, duh. In a properly democratic country we’d be able to use FOI to actually see the blacklist, but this is the BBC we’re talking about.)