Wings Over Scotland

Perhaps we’re just being over-sensitive, readers, but we think the Daily Record might be a little bit upset with us.

That’s the editor of the semi-popular Scottish Labour fanzine, Murray Foote, pictured above this afternoon apparently issuing his own very special honours list, but it’s not the crankiest thing the Record’s published in the last 24 hours.

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Alert readers may recall that five weeks ago we pointed out a whole bunch of Scottish media outlets reporting as fact that Jim Murphy would definitely stand for the East Renfrewshire seat at May’s general election – despite Murphy having actually made no such announcement, just repeating his weeks-old fudge that he was currently the selected candidate.

Guess what’s happened today, folks?

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Please give as generously as you can, readers. It’ll really upset the Daily Record.

Click the image to go to the 2015 Wings fundraiser site.

Sometimes a picture can say a lot more than a thousand words. Below, to the left of the vertical red line on our graphic, you can see the prominence that the Daily Record gave to their lies about “The Vow” and the Smith Commission report, which were found to be false by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

On the right of the line, at the same scale, is the prominence they gave to the truth.

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Well, now, there’s a thing.

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The comical furore about The Nurse Who Definitely Isn’t An Actress shows no signs of making sense any time soon.

24 hours and several demented pages of hysterical tabloid shrieking later, we’re still not sure whether a No activist and Labour supporter from Clackmannanshire is called Suzanne Duncan (as “Better Together” called her until at least June last year) or “Suzanne Hunter” (as the Daily Record calls her), though a bit of Facebook detective work suggests the latter.

We do at least seem to have cleared up her employment history, as the Daily Record has now very quietly and subtly changed its article of last night, which claimed she’d worked for eight years at a hospital that’s only been open for five.

But a whole bundle of other questions remain unanswered.

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You can never accuse the Scottish media of being knowingly underhysterical.

Tonight the Daily Record snuck out its semi-apology for telling the Scottish people the biggest lie we’ve seen on the front page of a newspaper since its parent the Mirror published fake pictures of soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners.

You can tell they’re not awfully pleased we forced them to make that “correction” by reporting the lie to the Independent Press Standards Organisation, because they even reference it in the editorial above.

Speaking of which – well, heck, where do we even start?

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Before we start, let’s make this plain: we will NOT be submitting any sort of complaint to any healthcare body regarding what we’re about to discuss, and we ask readers not to either. When push comes to shove, we don’t want nurses losing their jobs.

We just wish Scottish Labour felt the same way.

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We’re starting to think that we could save ourselves an awful lot of trouble by only posting every other day. Obviously that’d reduce the workload in numerical terms, but also we could avoid the impossible task of having to keep track of Scottish Labour’s endless litany of U-turns, flip-flops and reverse ferrets on policy, which as far as we can make out appear to switch 180 degrees on alternating days.

Whichever one we picked we’d end up with positions that were at least consistent, and not have to try to make sense of which of two totally conflicting viewpoints the party was professing to hold according to whether the date was odd or even.

As it stands, we have to deal with this sort of thing.

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On the left below is part of a Scottish Labour election leaflet that’s currently being put through Scottish letterboxes, featuring an alleged quote from an alleged NHS Scotland nurse identified as “Suzanne” from Clackmannanshire.

On the right is the CastingNow profile of an actress named only as “Suzanne” from Clackmannanshire, who describes herself by saying: “I’m very good at making people believe things which aren’t true hence why I’ve always been told to pursue acting.”

While they have very similarly-shaped faces and features, we have no idea whether the two Suzannes are the same person or if it’s just a strange and potentially amusing coincidence. But the point is, there’s no way of finding out.

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The gift that keeps on giving.

Mr McNeill still hasn’t publicly explained how he came to be telling Labour supporters to vote Tory and let the Conservatives gain four seats on Labour, but we assume his private reasons for his “Twitter mistake” must have been really really good to win over the “comrades” in such a short space of time, so that’s nice.

The trouble is, he’s not alone.

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