Wings Over Scotland

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?

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We realise that there’s some stiff competition for that accolade, even if you restrict it solely to things said by Kezia Dugdale, but this needs preserving for posterity.

A couple of questions do spring immediately to mind: (1) how does every country on Earth that isn’t Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland do it, and (2) given that Scotland has now been in the Union for 309 years, how much longer is it going to take before the two things are finally eradicated?

We look forward to hearing the answers from Labour any day now.

The former Chancellor of the Exchequer in today’s Press & Journal:

55-45 is “far more decisive” than 62-38? We think we’re finally beginning to understand why the last Labour government left the British economy in such a mess.

An article by Nick Cohen in the Spectator last night fairly had social media ablaze with a heady brew of anger and mockery.

It’s the most extraordinary outpouring of deranged, spittle-flecked arsewash we’ve seen outside of a Daily Express comment thread in a very considerable time, and it merits attention solely because we think it might have broken a world record for the number of empirical falsehoods contained in an article in a respectable media outlet.

Get your clickers out, readers. You’re going to need a fast trigger finger.

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The Daily Telegraph just released a video called “100 Reasons Why Brexit Was A Good Thing”. It listed them to a soundtrack of “Jerusalem”, the same song that closed the Labour Party conference earlier this week with its stirring ode to just one of the four nations of the United Kingdom.

100 reasons why #Brexit was a good thing pic.twitter.com/s2gyYSDUzJ

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 30, 2016

We’ve saved a few of the highlights below, just in case the Telegraph should delete the video in a fit of sanity. We’ve also added one fake one. See if you can spot it.

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You can see the full unedited Kezia Dugdale interview with Gordon Brewer on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland at this link, so you can verify that the shortened edit below isn’t misrepresenting anything. But if you don’t have time or attention span for the full 20 minutes, this’ll give you the gist without all the desperate waffling.

We think readers will agree that there can no longer be so much as a scintilla of doubt over whether Kezia believes Jeremy Corbyn can lead Labour to victory.

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The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.

But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.

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As several alert readers have already spotted, our Twitter account was suspended at some point in the early hours of this morning. We’ve had no email from Twitter offering any sort of explanation, but it seems most likely to have been at the behest of a Daily Express hack called Siobhan McFadyen who’s been huffily bleating to the company’s executives over the weekend about this tweet:

The reason we tweeted that comment is detailed here and here. But apparently it’s an opinion that you’re no longer allowed to have.

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More or less since the morning of 19 September 2014, the Unionist parties in Scotland have kept up an unceasing chorus of “You lost! Accept it!” directed at the entire Yes movement, but primarily the SNP (despite the SNP having never to date disputed the result or called for a re-run of the referendum).

Readers may not be entirely astonished to discover this morning that at least as far as Scottish Labour are concerned, that principle only applies to other people.

Because we’re pretty sure there’s already a name for when political parties set out an “alternative programme of government”.

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This is the demented, McCarthyite state of madness the Labour Party has reached:

This is a party now openly rejecting anyone as a member who has ever supported any other party. We’d take a minute to try to explain to them how the arithmetic of that one works out, but they’re a long, long way beyond the grasp of reason now.

The Scottish media has worked itself into an indignant froth over the last few days about the appearance of Sputnik News – an Edinburgh-based arm of a publicly-owned, state-run Russian news agency, fronted by (among others) former Dateline Scotland and NewsShaft stars Jack Foster and Carolyn Scott.

(Any resemblance to publicly-owned, state-run national news agencies of questionable impartiality in other countries is of course entirely coincidental and totally different.)

The Sunday Herald ran a bizarre smear piece yesterday on the pair’s past fundraising initiatives for their two previous projects (which were obviously completely unrelated to Sputnik), and today’s Times has an even weirder column by Melanie Reid in which Foster and Scott are directly and startlingly compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

We tried, for the purposes of satire, to think of another country that played host to nuclear missiles that were controversially imposed on it by an external government, but unfortunately we couldn’t come up with anything. Sorry about that.

Annie Wells and Brian Whittle are two new Conservative MSPs. Look how happy and excited they are today at Labour winning a council by-election from the SNP.

The SNP candidate actually won comfortably on first-preference votes, but was edged out at the sixth count under the Single Transferable Vote system when 78% of Tory voters gave their second preference to Labour (whose own vote fell 7%).

We’re trying to think of a good reason why they’re still two separate parties, but to be honest with you, readers, we’re coming up short.