Wings Over Scotland

We’re just going to reprint this piece every year, because only the numbers change.

Today saw the publication of the 2017-18 GERS stats, which are once again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the current decade stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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So Jeremy Corbyn’s four-day crusade to win back Scotland is going swimmingly. In the rare moments when his MSPs and Lords aren’t undermining him by attacking him over Brexit and anti-Semitism or making embarrassing gaffes about arms companies, he’s giving speeches like this one yesterday at bus-maker Alexander Dennis:

Boosting industry in Scotland benefits the whole of the UK. pic.twitter.com/6OJrr2NL9p

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) August 21, 2018

Presumably by promoting and supporting Britain’s manufacturing industry he means companies just like Dennis, and presumably supporting them would include, say, giving them grants to help develop new low-carbon technologies.

Which is a bit odd, because it’s not even two years since the Scottish Government did exactly that, and got sourly pilloried by the Scottish media and opposition – including Scottish Labour, who said there were “serious questions to be asked” about the award – for it being a “ridiculous” “cronyism” “outrage”.

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Whenever Scottish Labour rouse themselve to try to rally their handful of remaining supporters by whipping up some fake moral outrage – on this occasion about the Scottish Government giving a grant to an arms manufacturer (helped as always by an obedient Scottish press, and on this occasion by a fairly extraordinary on-air meltdown from Good Morning Scotland interviewer Gillian Marles) – we tend to just sigh and set the stopwatch going to see how long it’ll take to backfire in a horribly messy explosion.

But this one was especially splattery.

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We couldn’t help noticing one particular Rory Bremner tweet last night.

And we thought, “Well, WE know someone who predicted those things.”

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So this didn’t go down too well on social media last night.

Prof Bueltmann, who’s made her life in Scotland for 20 years, was (as far as we can tell) the only independence supporter to speak at a poorly-attended rally in Edinburgh calling for a fatuously-named “People’s Vote” on Brexit.

Pretty much everyone else on the platform had campaigned for No in 2014 in one way or another, from Gavin “grassroots” Esler to Rory “best of both worlds” Bremner, Ming “freeze out the Nats” Campbell and Malcolm “Medics for No” Macleod.

And when some Twitter users expressed a modicum of resentment at being ordered to get behind the “People’s Vote” campaign by the very people who are responsible for Scotland still being shackled to the UK and therefore dragged out of the EU in the first place, the Unionists got terribly hurt and sniffy.

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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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