Wings Over Scotland

Chris McEleny is an SNP councillor. This is a personal opinion.

Three weeks into the Salmond saga and the MSM are getting increasingly desperate. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the breathless excitement of reportage of the Daily Record and their sister paper the Sunday Mail.

For three successive days last week they led on the “story” which meant it was the third week running where Salmond appeared on the front page of the Mail.

However, our friends down in Central Quay have a problem.

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We’ve got to admit, the Yorkshire chap makes a fair point.

God bless our dear old pals at the Labour-fronted Tory money-sink that is Scotland In Union. Fresh from their latest stirring morning office singalong of “No Pope Of Rome”, they’ve decided to belatedly get in on the fact-checking game.

As the established force in the field, we had to have a look.

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There’s a fascinating piece in the Guardian this morning.

It reveals that in attempting to solve the unsolvable Irish border problem, the EU’s Brexit negotiators are – at the UK’s behest – trying to come up with a plan which would preclude its use for Scotland in the event of independence.

That’s an entirely legitimate course of action. Having lacked the courage to establish itself as a nation, Scotland shouldn’t expect to be treated as one by either the EU or the UK (which has demonstrated its contempt by flatly refusing Scotland any voice in negotiations). The EU is quite properly, and admirably stoutly, defending the interests of its member state, Ireland. Would that Scotland had such clout.

But it’s worth taking a second to ponder what it all means.

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Vince Cable, who was once apparently some sort of politician, took it upon himself to issue an opinion yesterday on the subject of referendums that had independence supporters on social media hooting with mocking laughter long into the night.

The estimable Wee Ginger Dug has already dealt adroitly with just the 300 or so most obviously ridiculous aspects of Cable’s tone-deaf and spectacularly hypocritical view, so we won’t step on his paws by repeating them here.

Instead we thought we’d do what we do best, and check the facts.

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As certain elements of the Yes movement do their best (yet again) to foment some sort of civil war over a popular 1990s movie for no better reason than to draw a little bit of attention to themselves in the face of rapidly-plummetting readership and influence, we found ourselves instead pondering a different Scottish historical battle today.

We’ll leave it at that.

Readers may have noted a fairly concerted attempt over the last 18 months or so by the opponents of Scottish independence to get Wings Over Scotland shut down. But sometimes the greatest danger comes from the people you least suspect.

Because the thing SNP MP Pete Wishart is lauding in that tweet earlier today, and has been agitating for for months, would, without a shadow of a doubt, kill this website and scores of others like it overnight.

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The Scottish Daily Mail fished this story out of the news toilet today:

So “man with major and important job gets paid the same rate for a full day’s work as Britain’s 800+ Lords and Ladies do for signing in for five minutes and then going home“ is apparently a shock-horror scoop now. But it gets better.

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There’s not much going on in Scottish politics at the moment, but you know that when the media resorts to printing stuff from echo-skulled Tory mousewit Annie Wells, there can’t even have been any barrel left to scrape.

Grimly, the spelling in the headline is the LEAST embarrassing facet of the story.

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Kenny McBride is a Wings reader. This is his personal experience and view. 

A couple of weeks ago Ian Small, BBC Scotland’s Head of Public Policy, wrote an article for the Scotsman addressing the question of anti-independence bias at Pacific Quay. Naturally he defended the Corporation strongly, but he also made what seemed like an invitation:

“The issue over BBC content being posted online brought a further consequence, with over 200 people turning up at Pacific Quay in Glasgow last week to demonstrate against BBC bias. We offered to talk. That offer still stands. We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-making.”

I was sceptical, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I decided to act.

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Last night we stumbled across an interesting little statistical wrinkle to our story from Wednesday about voters’ satisfaction with Scottish public services.

The middle set of figures there is especially revealing.

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