The mastermind 317
Posted on
February 03, 2018 by
Chris Cairns
Archive for the ‘scottish politics’
The waste disposal service 197
Posted on
February 02, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers may recall as far back as November, when we ran an article on a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail hatchet job which claimed that “the SNP has squandered £2bn” in its ten years in office, but only actually listed around £800m in supposed waste.
The independent press regulator IPSO is still in a great big sulking strop with us for reasons we can’t remember, so rejects any complaints that come directly from Wings, but the good thing about having a 300,000-strong army of readers is that some kind soul will usually take on the task for us.
And this one turned out to be fascinating.
Scottish Lib Dems Fact Check 210
Posted on
February 01, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Replacement bollocks service 344
Posted on
January 31, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Alert readers may recall some articles last August in which we highlighted the total pig’s breakfast Scotland’s media had made of reporting ScotRail punctuality figures, centred around mistaking the “on time” figures (trains arriving within 59 seconds of their scheduled time, ie at the advertised minute) for the “PPM” figures (trains arriving within five minutes) which are the basis of official punctuality targets.
Several newspapers, including the Herald, Courier, Daily Record and Daily Mail, had to publish corrections after our articles, so we can be pretty sure they won’t have made that mistake again with the latest stats.
Can’t we?
The less-vigorous approach 447
Posted on
January 28, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Since we’re talking about sectarianism and bigotry this week, we’ve got you a 1998 Scotsman piece on the subject. The full piece is below, but our favourite lines come from Scotland In Union stalwart and noted Twitter zoomer “Professor” Tom Gallagher.
Wow. And the Ku Klux Klan’s distinctiveness stems from their white identity, we guess, although perhaps they have misgivings about some aspects of lynching black people and setting fire to crosses on their lawns.
While we’re talking about bigots 147
Posted on
January 28, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Which we were yesterday, we couldn’t help noticing this:
And that reminded us that we still had some more poll results to reveal.
Heroes of the working class 164
Posted on
January 27, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We’re a bit annoyed about this, because we were going to give the Absolute Fanny Of The Week award to Anas Sarwar every week as a joke, but now it seems we can’t.
So that’s a professional journalist who’s studied the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, or OBFA, so intently and diligently that he keeps calling it “OBAF” instead. But that’s not the stupidest of it.
The Lord Ignoble 133
Posted on
January 27, 2018 by
Chris Cairns
(In case you missed this particular twist.)
Fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake 213
Posted on
January 26, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
The very strange man who is David Leask, chief reporter at the Herald, has been hard at work with a shovel ever since we ran a couple of stories on Monday.
Accusing this site of publishing “an implausible blog about our paper this week, based on some unchecked &, well, weird assumptions”, he curiously neglected to specify what those assumptions might have been, while embarking on a long, rambling and bewildering rant about what does and doesn’t constitute “fake news”.
Leask’s argument, at least in so far as we can make any sense of it at all, is that even deliberately and knowingly made-up lies printed in mainstream newspapers are not, and can never be, “fake news”.
That’s a term which he insists only applies to spoof sites pretending to be real news outlets, which we’d presume – although it’s by no means clear – means the likes of The Onion or the Daily Mash.
Which is an odd angle.
An early failure 277
Posted on
January 25, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
By hook or by Cook 553
Posted on
January 23, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
This is an interesting one. Almost 40 years on from the event, Scottish politics is still plagued by micro-brained Labour types insisting that the SNP “ushered in” Margaret Thatcher after the devolution referendum of 1979 was sabotaged by a Labour MP.
SNP supporters counter that this is complete bollocks, largely because it’s complete bollocks. James Callaghan, the Labour PM at the time, blamed 34 of his own MPs for bringing his government down, by supporting an amendment from Islington South and Finsbury Labour MP George Cunningham which blocked the creation of a Scottish Assembly even though it won the referendum by a narrow margin.
(Cunningham resigned from Labour two years later and subsequently joined the SDP, but in 2012 the Daily Express dragged him out to demand that the same “40% rule” be applied to the indyref.)
History, though, has forgotten someone else who was apparently the true architect of the fix, to the extent that we’d never heard about it until now.
Let’s find out more, shall we?
The Fantasists 138
Posted on
January 22, 2018 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
We thought it might be worth going through this in a bit more detail.
The phrase “out of control” is in quote marks in the Herald’s front-page headline, leading readers to believe someone has said it, but who? Let’s investigate.
