Wings Over Scotland

Stuck for any actual news at the tail of the Easter weekend, today’s Scottish Daily Mail reaches once again into the bag marked “Emergency Barrel Scrapings” and comes up with that old faithful beloved of all newspapers, a shock-horror “OMG LOOK HOW EXPENSIVE THE TRAINS ARE!” story.

It’s always an easy hit – partly because since a shambolic, fragmented privatisation the UK does have pretty much the most expensive railways per mile in the civilised world, but also because regular train users tend to mainly travel in the same area all the time, and are easily persuaded that they have it worse than people anywhere else.

So let’s ignore all the Mail’s ridiculous cobblers blaming the SNP – who have very limited control over the fare policies of Abellio (the Dutch state-owned company who run ScotRail) and who have been prevented by successive UK governments from nationalising the network – and just see if that’s true.

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A large and imposing statue built in 1974 still stands today on Clyde Street in Glasgow. It depicts a woman called Dolores Ibarruri, known as “La Pasionaria”, who was one of the heroes of the anti-fascist resistance in Spain in the 1930s.

The statue was funded by “the British Labour Movement”, but Conservative councillors in the city protested angrily when it was erected and vowed to tear it down if they ever controlled the council (which cynical readers might consider an empty threat).

How times change. Read the rest of this entry →

There’s an interesting article on the Holyrood Magazine website today with some fascinating background details about how Scottish (and Welsh) devolution came into being almost 20 years ago, so we thought you might like to see this piece from the time, not least because we suspect it might also be the first recorded citation of the nonsensical concept of the “UK single market”.

(Click for readable size.)

It’s remarkable how seamlessly much of it, especially the last section (from the giant “D”) would still work today with the word “devolution” replaced with the word “independence”. But we find it hard to disagree with Sir John’s conclusion:

“Nor would devolution truly give more powers to the Scottish people. Only independence would do that.”

Preach, brother.

Last week we dropped the Electoral Commission a short line to see if there’d been any progress in their investigation into our revelations of last December about the extremist loongroup Scotland In Union’s funding. Today we got a reply:

So just to clarify: an organisation whose specific stated purpose is to fight elections, and which has been a registered campaigner in several general elections, spending tens of thousands of pounds at a time, has raised over £600,000 in mainly large donations from wealthy and secretive donors since 2015 – a period where there has hardly ever NOT been an election going on in which spending and donations were regulated – and yet not one single penny of it has been declarable income.

That’s… interesting. We’ve asked the EC if any further detail will be forthcoming.

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There was (unintentionally, we presume) a very revealing turn of phrase used by Tory MEP Jacqueline Foster on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 28 March 2018)
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“Scotland held a referendum on independence a couple of years earlier, and if the Scots had won that referendum to leave the United Kingdom, they’d have left the European Union.”

We suppose it’s nice that even the Tories finally agree that Scotland lost by voting No. But it’s interesting to hear that apparently there has never been any way for Scots to stay in the EU – if they voted Yes in 2014 they were out, if they voted No in 2014 they were out, and even though they voted Remain in 2016 they’re going out.

Any fair-minded democrat would surely then accept that Scotland’s voters deserve one chance to actually make that choice in a meaningful way, no?

This is a grim and dispiriting time to be monitoring the Scottish political media, even by its normal low standards. So little is happening that Unionist newspapers desperate for any kind of SNP BAD story are scraping the residue from the scrapings from the barrel that they scraped away to splinters months ago.

A case in point is today’s FRONT-PAGE piece in the Herald containing the shocking revelation that someone connected with the SNP registered – in their own name, not even the party’s – an internet domain called organise.scot last summer.

Even though the domain is still unused eight months later and there isn’t a shred of evidence about what it might ever be used for, a couple of opposition benchwarmers speculating that a private individual registering a web domain must somehow prove that the sneaky SNP are plotting a new independence campaign was considered by the Herald to be not just news, but front-page news.

(It’ll certainly come as a massive shock to everyone in Scotland who assumed that the SNP had given up on seeking independence after pursuing it as their primary reason for existence for a mere 85 years or so.)

And alarmingly, it wasn’t even the stupidest piece of Nat-bashing to appear in the Scottish press in the last 48 hours.

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Remember that time, barely over a decade ago, when the readers of the Scottish Daily Express came out for independence despite national polls only showing support in the 20s, the paper sold over 80,000 copies a day (now just 38,000) and Severin Carrell of the Guardian reported that it was about to adopt independence as its official position?

(Which we don’t think ever actually happened.)

Because nothing is weirder than Scottish politics.

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One perspective:

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We’ve been scouring our picture archives all afternoon for something more surprising than the fact that the UK government has screwed over the Scottish fishing industry again after it voted Brexit and Tory in 2016 and 2017, and we found this one.

See also: literally anything else that has ever happened on Earth.

A new Scottish Labour propaganda website called The Red Robin attracted some attention at the weekend by claiming that new polling had shown Labour closing the Westminster voting gap on the SNP to just 4 points.

To try to lend some credibility to this rather dubious assertion – the SNP’s average lead is currently around 15 points – it pointed out that the polling company’s owner was the Vice-Chair of the British Polling Council.

Readers would quite reasonably infer from that that Moonlight Research was a BPC member, and BPC rules state that if figures from a poll enter the public domain, the full data tables concerning those figures have to be released within 48 hours so that people can scrutinise them and ensure that the methodology (sample size, weighting, question wording etc) is fully up to scratch and above board.

So since the blog post is now five days old, we dropped Moonlight a line asking if we could see them, and quickly got an interesting reply.

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Particularly alert readers may have experienced a pang of deja vu at yesterday’s story highlighting media misrepresentation of polling figures.

We can’t imagine why.

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