Wings Over Scotland

Brian Spanner Fan Club chair JK Rowling yesterday moved quickly to correct some press reports that she’d abandoned her plans to sue independent MP Natalie McGarry over alleged defamation.

Tweeting to Herald reporter Martin Williams, she snippily noted:

The true nature of the “request” therefore seems unmistakeable – “make a donation to my charity or get sued by someone richer than the Queen”.

And we can’t help wondering whether that’s tantamount to blackmail.

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To the astonishment of all, it turns out that JK Rowling isn’t going to sue anyone after all. Or, as the ever-reliable-and-accurate Scottish Daily Mail puts it:

(It seems needlessly churlish and picky to also point out that McGarry currently isn’t an “SNP MP”, so we won’t do that.)

Instead, the author, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, intends to try to pressure McGarry into making a donation to her childrens’ charity, Lumos, which we can only presume is happy to receive money generated by what some people might regard as intimidation bordering on blackmail.

So that’s all well and good. If you’re going to bully people, after all, it’s probably best if it’s at least for a worthy cause. Rowling was full of praise for abusive Tweeter “Brian Spanner” when he raised some money for the same charity last year by selling t-shirts mocking the loony “Scottish Resistance” campaign group.

But not all charitable donations attract such gratitude.

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Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

The Scottish Daily Mail’s front page lead today is so galactically despicable that it’s easy to overlook another story that it bundles in with the same “SNP BAD” attack.

While excoriating Dr Philippa Whitford for having the sheer shameless gall to help save women’s lives in her holidays, the alleged newspaper also devotes a page-high article to an attack on another Nat MP, George Kerevan, for employing his wife.

The headline, however, omits a rather key fact.

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As it happens, one of the things that we’ve been occupying ourselves with during the current news drought is pulling together a post called “The SNPBAD Files”, collecting all the desperate smear and innuendo of the Unionist press as it systematically tries to discredit every one of the 56 SNP MPs elected last May.

Until last night we hadn’t been sure which had been the most pathetically dismal. Was it the MP who still did a few haircuts in his barber shop on Saturday afternoons? The one who bought a derelict London house many years before he was an MP, renovated it with his own hands and now sometimes stays there when working at Westminster, rather than charging expenses to the public for accommodation? Or perhaps the one who tweeted that he was opposed to the concept of monarchy, the foul monster?

Now, though, we have a clear winner.

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Here’s Kezia in the Independent yesterday:

The most powerful? Did it just get promoted?

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In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.

It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.

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We’re not saying there isn’t a lot going on at the moment, but today’s Daily Record actually devotes a page to telling women when to change their pants.

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Below is a 17-minute section of this afternoon’s John Beattie show on BBC Radio Scotland, featuring me and an amateur blogger with a keen interest in Pedigree Chum discussing the effect of the lower oil price on the Scottish economy.

(John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 January 2016)
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Happily, by the end of the show everyone on all sides was agreed that the lower oil price will actually benefit the Scottish economy overall, with the positive effects driving growth and outweighing the downside of lower corporation tax receipts.

So that’s genuine progress – next time some frothing Yoon screams “OIL PRICE! BLACK HOLE! SNP LIES! TOO WEE, TOO POOR!” at you, you can direct them here for categorical agreement from the Yes and No sides alike that actually the falling oil price makes an independent Scotland MORE economically viable, not less.

Unfortunately you’ll have to put up with a condescending, patronising arse sniggering randomly throughout, but it’s a relatively small price to pay.

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Referendum day, 18 September 2014:

“English tourists are cancelling holidays to Scotland because they fear ‘ill feeling’ towards them after the referendum, it emerged today.

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Normally when the BBC’s Andrew Neil asks a politician to put a figure on one of their policy proposals the interviewee should be wary, because a trap is about to be sprung.

For some reason that didn’t happen today.

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The phrase most repeated by angry Unionists in the 16-and-a-bit months since the independence referendum is surely “once in a generation”. While the SNP quietly gets on with the business of government, having not mentioned a second referendum in its 2015 manifesto and not being expected to do so in this year’s either, the parties of the UK can’t seem to shut up about it.

The Tories in particular seem determined to make “NO SECOND REFERENDUM” the main plank of their 2016 election campaign, despite nobody actually proposing one.

(This is happening despite Ruth Davidson having said just nine months ago that her party wouldn’t block a second indyref, while Ed Miliband said that Labour would. However, Davidson’s organ-grinder, David Cameron, joined Labour in ruling it out just a few months later, which may explain Davidson performing a sudden U-turn akin to her famous one over more devolution.)

And when you boil it down to the brass tacks, what that means is that the parties of the Union want to hold the Scottish people prisoner.

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