Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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

The open sewer of some newspapers has been in full torrent this week. However it surged over the overflow pipe with the hysteria in last weekend’s Sunday Mail.

In a deranged editorial it actually argued that Alex Salmond should stay out of the SNP “whatever happens with his legal challenge and the subsequent police investigation”.

In other words, “regardless of innocence or guilt, regardless of whether the procedures are judged just or unjust we just don’t like him”.

Actually it’s not what they like or don’t like. It’s fear that motivates much of the mainstream media against Salmond.

Read the rest of this entry →

There’s a very weird story in the Scotsman today.

As alert readers will have noticed from the third paragraph, the headline is actually an inexplicably negative spin on the fact that journeys on the line INCREASED last year by 5.8% to a new record high of 1.5 million.

Read the rest of this entry →

This year’s Scottish Household Survey is out, and the press is in an absolutely gleeful orgy of misery over it. Here’s the Times, for example:

The paper’s leading line is that “only half of those polled were happy with schools, the NHS and transport provision in their area”. So readers would naturally assume that the other half were DISsatisfied, right?

The reality is somewhat different.

Read the rest of this entry →

Perhaps the single most striking feature of everyday non-constitutional Scottish politics is Labour’s constantly-recurring habit of highlighting some supposedly unsatisfactory statistic about the Scottish Government’s performance, only for it to be revealed that it’s vastly better than the comparable figure for Wales, where Labour has been in power ever since the Assembly was created in 1999.

So let’s crank up the machine again and see what it says, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s been a tough few days for the Daily Record. So maybe we should forgive this:

Let’s just enjoy those pie charts for a moment.

Read the rest of this entry →

New polling out tonight from British Polling Council members Deltapoll.

Excluding don’t-knows, both of those sets of figures come out at 52-48 margins: for Yes if Brexit goes ahead, for No if it doesn’t. If Brexit isn’t mentioned in the question at all, the results are 49% Yes 51% No.

Excluding don’t knows, the figures for Northern Ireland are 57-43 in favour of a united Ireland in the event of Brexit, and 60-40 against if Brexit is averted.

Fair bit at stake in the next few months, then.