One of the videos below is a genuine “Better Together” campaign broadcast, pulled from TV at the last minute (despite costing £50,000 to make) and today revealed by Buzzfeed. The other is a spoof we made in June 2014.
Good luck figuring out which is the real one, folks.
Namely, that of a 100%-certain victory in indyref 2:
We might take the rest of the day off to celebrate.
As alert readers will know, one of the primary purposes of this website isn’t just to tell people when the Scottish and UK media is lying to them, but to teach readers how to spot that for themselves. And one of the keys to learning that is to ask yourself what a story in the press is leaving out as well as what it’s telling you.
So last week, when several newspapers went on an orgy of shock-horror reporting about SNP MPs’ expenses – focusing mostly on aeroplane flights and only quoting figures for a small handful of MPs who’d allegedly been claiming far more taxpayers’ money than their Unionist predecessors – alarm bells started ringing everywhere.
And just as we’ve taught them to, Wings readers leapt into action to do the hard work that Scotland’s professional journalists don’t want to do, in order to provide Scots with the facts that the media doesn’t want them to know.
Nobody could ever accuse the Scottish press of underpromoting its grievances – alert readers will still recall, for example, the long procession of articles with near-identical content in the Daily Mail last year about SNP MPs and their “second jobs”. For 2016, though, the media’s obsessive repeating of the exact same story every few weeks has manifested itself over Nat members’ expenses.
So let’s take a quick look.
Can be half-full or half-empty. Neither of the stories below is untrue.
Readers can make their own judgements on the Scottish Daily Mail’s agenda.
There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.
It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.
This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:
Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.
One of our favourite things to remember is what Scottish Labour regional manager Kezia Dugdale said when she was elected to the head-of-branch post 15 months ago:
We like to periodically check how that’s going.
Even seasoned and cynical observers of the Scottish opposition and press such as ourselves, readers, have been rubbing our eyes in startled disbelief this week at the spectacular about-face performed by the aforementioned parties with regard to the Scottish Government’s £10bn Chinese investment “deal” that was never an actual deal, and which may or may not have collapsed.
But today’s Times just about boggled our minds completely.
Well, who could disagree with that? Who would suggest otherwise?
Because, astonishing as it might seem in the circumstances, Ruth Davidson actually genuinely tried to get away with this at First Minister’s Questions yesterday:
They really do think we won’t remember, readers.
This week, in Snide Troll News, this happened:
We expect nothing but idiocy of Fraser. But Mr Torrance, who is a ubiquitous presence in the Scottish media, appears – by no means for the first time – not to have the facts at his fingertips. So let’s see if we can help him out.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
