Wings Over Scotland

Before we were so rudely interrupted, we were about to write a little more about the issues around the BBC’s takedown of this site’s YouTube channel. Because while we got a very respectable five-and-a-half minutes on Good Morning Scotland earlier today, you never have the time on radio or TV to say everything you want to.

Incidentally, we get the impression – nothing more solid than that – from a number of sources that BBC Scotland are somewhat out of the loop over the whole affair, and the impetus to silence Wings has actually come from London, which is slightly scarier. But aside from that, there are a number of really rather disturbing aspects to the situation.

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Well, that’s curious. No sooner had I got back home from the BBC Radio studio in Bath after going on today’s Good Morning Scotland to discuss the Corporation’s closing down of my YouTube channel than I found a new email from YouTube in my inbox.

No explanation of any kind was offered for the decision – we can’t imagine what has led YouTube to conclude all by itself that we don’t have the “necessary rights” – and it appears to let the BBC entirely off the hook from having to decide whether to launch a court case or concede the fair use of the clips.

We’ll be investigating further to see what we can find out.

So this morning, four days after our entire YouTube channel was deleted at the behest of the BBC, and after days of wrestling with YouTube’s shambolic robot-staffed admin maze, we finally managed to get an email out of them with the full list of what the BBC had complained about.

(If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, we can recommend contacting @TeamYouTube on Twitter, who appear to be actual human people and can eventually prod the robots into action.)

The signatory was a London-based BBC lawyer, who’d plucked 13 videos apparently at random from the hundreds on our channel and decided to whine about them (citing US copyright law, rather than UK) up to four and a half years later.

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So what we only suspected is now official. In a response to The National, the BBC have confirmed that they were behind the termination of this site’s YouTube channel.

We have to admit, that “irrespective of the political views” line is a classic.

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We happened to be looking at a couple of old articles this morning, and noticed that some of them had blank spaces where videos should be.

We didn’t think much of it at first, because people do sometimes delete old videos or shut down their accounts, but when we checked one of them we discovered it was hosted on the Wings Over Scotland channel.

Or rather, it USED to be, because our YouTube channel isn’t there any more.

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It’s not easy to type with your jaw on the floor, readers.

But in the six and a half years we’ve been watching the Scottish media here on Wings, this surely has to be an all-time low.

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As alert readers will recall, nowadays we only look at the Scottish Daily Express if we’re absolutely desperate for material, so this piece slipped past us a few days ago:

And since the only thing in the papers today is page after page of unbearable fawning drivel about the stupendously insignificant (fifth in line to the throne, will never ever be king unless a terrorist blows up Buckingham Palace with an atomic bomb, is roughly as important to the wellbeing of the nation as Hamilton Accies’ third-choice goalkeeper) royal baby, we figured we may as well have a look at it now.

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Yes, we know the Express announces a “killer blow” to independence every couple of weeks. But otherwise we can think of nothing to add to this story, so just click the pic to read and enjoy.

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This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:

As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.

But that wasn’t the weird bit.

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An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.

And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.

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Late last night in the House Of Commons saw one of the most significant votes in the history of UK constitutional politics. A group of Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose an amendment which would have protected the central building block of Scottish (and Welsh) devolution – the principle that any powers not explicitly reserved are devolved – from the UK government’s attempted huge power grab under the cover of Brexit.

Those very same Scottish Tory MPs had previously pledged to stand up for Scotland’s interests regardless of loyalty to their party, and had repeatedly expressed their grave disappointment at the deeply unsatisfactory condition of the Withdrawal Bill.

Last night they could have fixed it by supporting the amendment (backed by every other Scottish MP right across party lines), which would have tipped the arithmetic and ensured its success. Instead they betrayed every voter in Scotland – including their own – by waving the bill through unamended and passing the buck to the unelected House Of Lords, which has no representatives from Scotland’s most popular party.

This morning, BBC Scotland led on the fact that it snowed a bit in Scotland in January.

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On a number of previous occasions we’ve highlighted the weird discrepancy between the undivided loathing of the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act in the Scottish media and the Act’s overwhelming popularity with the Scottish public.

You will struggle to ever hear a voice anywhere in the media in favour of it, yet there has never been a law in the history of the Holyrood parliament that is as universally backed by the electorate as the OBFA. Support for it crosses party lines, unites men and women, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, Yes voters and No voters, Celtic fans and “Rangers” fans, football lovers and football haters, and pretty much any other groups you can think of.

Despite their own voters wanting to retain it, however, the combined opposition parties may well succeed in having the Act repealed this year, for reasons of their own that we can’t begin to rationally explain.

Meanwhile, every party at Holyrood – this time including the SNP – looks as though they may be preparing to come together and implement the LEAST-wanted legislation (in terms of public opinion) that the Parliament will have ever seen.

But which legislation are we talking about?

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