Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.
But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.
We already knew what David Mundell’s guarantees were worth, of course. So it’s not like we can exactly feign surprise at this.
The best we can say is that at least this time it took four months for the Secretary Of State’s promise to completely and utterly collapse, not 48 hours.
In a month of positive statistics for Scotland – including unexpectedly high economic growth figures, continuing to lead the UK and hitting its own tough targets for hospital waiting times (which drew an incredibly petty and insulting response from Scottish Labour), and huge progress in rail punctuality (now also the best anywhere in the country) – perhaps the most welcome of all was the release yesterday of the lowest unemployment figures for quarter of a century.
(Again the best in the UK, and in fact the best in Scotland of all time, since separate Scottish records only started to be kept in 1992.)
The Scotsman commendably gave the glad tidings top billing on its front page.
But despite it being slow news season, the rest of the media was a little less excited.
So this is a thing that happened yesterday:
Because, as ever, Scottish Labour are absolutely certain that voters are morons.
“Colonel” Ruth Davidson took time out from her holidays yesterday to unleash an extraordinary (and unusually defensive) 35-part Twitter tirade about the reaction to her appointment as an honorary military commander. So barren is the summer political news desert that two newspapers put it on their front page today, giving the BBC an excuse to deem it the day’s biggest story.
But that wasn’t the bit that caught our eye.
The term “fake news” has become somewhat devalued from overuse recently, and often translates simply to “news I disagree with or don’t like”. But this, from today’s Scottish Daily Mail, is a bona fide sighting:
Let’s just break that down.
Hanzala Malik has been a Glasgow Labour politician for 22 years without anyone noticing. His Wikipedia entry sums up his contribution to Scottish politics over that time in a single 25-word sentence amounting to “served on some committees”.
But he got noticed yesterday.
Because so committed was Malik to the core ideological principle of Scottish Labour – namely that absolutely everything bad that happens anywhere is the SNP’s fault – that he somewhat overstretched himself and blamed them for the closure of six Jobcentres in Glasgow, despite the startlingly obvious facts that responsibility for the decision lies solely with the UK government and the closures have been opposed consistently by every SNP MP in the city, two things Malik can’t possibly have not known.
After an outcry on social media when an alert Wings reader spotted the falsehood, Malik quietly amended the Facebook post twice, first from an attack on “the SNP” to the rather ambiguous “Government” and then finally to the accurate “UK government”. But “SNP BAD” will always be Labour’s instinctive default reaction.
From today’s Scotsman, you can almost physically taste the tormented anguish of the three Unionist party spokesmen that Scotland’s economy isn’t in recession, and has in fact just posted its best growth figures since before the oil-price crash.
Spare them a thought today, won’t you?
Here’s the doom-and-gloom front-page headline of the Herald today:
It refers to a new report from the Nuffield Trust called “Learning From NHS Scotland”. Its 61 pages contain precisely one mention of independence. Let’s see what it said.
We’re always loath to criticise political journalists for feeble stories published during the summer season, when parliaments are in recess and there’s nothing much happening to fill space with. But the Sunday Post has started pretty early this year.
Let’s see if we can put a number on the degree of “dilution” here, shall we?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
