As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.
In more senses than one.
The Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter has had some wise words to say on the subject of social media in the past few weeks, most recently on New Year’s Day:
The month before, though, he’d been even more to the point.
We tweeted this proposition last night (the quote comes from a blog post yesterday by Scottish Labour madcase and all-round comedy relief Ian Smart):
We thought you might enjoy some of the responses as much as we did.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
It’s time to find out just how alert you really are, readers.
The answers to each of the 24 questions below about Scottish politics in 2015 can be found in Wings articles. But no Googling – we’ll know.
The Scottish Daily Mail, which alongside its Sunday sister paper is spending the festive period engaged in an “SNP BAD!” frenzy – attacking the party over everything from foxhunting to the brutal Stalinist suppression of free speech to using taxpayers’ money to send people Christmas cards – today runs the same story across a news page, a comment column and an editorial leader:
Let’s take a closer look.
The Christmas truce on social media ended unusually early this year as Magnus Gardham, the political editor of the Herald, filed a column which had all the hallmarks of a man who’d overdone the sprouts and redirected the usual outcome of such an error out of his mouth rather than the other end of his digestive tract.
Backed up with a series of borderline-trolling tweets from his Herald colleague David Leask (who ambitiously referred to Gardham as a “genius”), the piece triggered a mild stushie on Twitter which we fully expect to see written up in tomorrow’s papers as “VILE CYBERNATS IN ABUSE STORM”, because it’s Christmas and you’ve got to fill pages with something.
This was a brief exchange between the Scotland correspondent of the Guardian and the Political Editor of the Daily Record on Twitter last night. (The hug referred to is the one between Nicola Sturgeon, Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru and Natalie Bennett of the Greens at one of the leaders’ debates for the May general election.)
A little vision of the future, there.
As SNP forecasting incompetence sees Forth Road Bridge re-open two weeks ahead of schedule, throwing holiday travel plans into chaos for thousands.
Many questions to answer.
Telling voters they’re morons and robots rather surprisingly hasn’t worked.
We suspect the opposition parties will give it a few more years just to be sure.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
