Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

It’s an almost impossible task to identify the most despicable sewer-dredging piece of “journalism” that the Scottish press has spewed out in the past 10 days or so of demented obsession with as-yet-unsubstantiated allegations by two unnamed women against Alex Salmond, but today’s Sunday Mail must be a strong contender.

The paper runs a four-page orgy of hypocritical moralistic shrieking based on Salmond’s outrageous and unacceptable behaviour in, um, thanking the people who donated to his crowdfunder to challenge the process by which the story was improperly leaked to the media. The monster.

And if you think that’s a ludicrously thin basis on which to create a front-page splash and three pages of screaming drivel inside, wait until you actually see some of it.

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While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

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Ashley Graczyk, formerly-Tory councillor:

Complete series here.

Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.

One man, of course, led from the front.

Ouch.

As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers in two decades of being an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.

Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.

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Strange times. 

Well, this is odd. An alert reader has sent us the response they just received from the BBC to a question about our recent banning from YouTube, and it’s curious.

“No discretion”, eh? That’s not what they said last week.

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The data in this Scottish Government reply to an alert reader this week pretty much speaks for itself, so we’re not going to add too much to it.

The number of FOI requests submitted to the Scottish Government by the BBC in the past three years (112) is more than 25% higher than the total number submitted in the previous seven years (89).

The number submitted by Labour in 2017 was more than TEN TIMES as many as it submitted in 2008, and twice as many as any other year.

The number submitted by the Tories in 2017 was a third more than the total number submitted in the previous NINE years (92). They’ve also exceeded that total in the first seven months of this year alone.

And as the highlighted passage notes, the true numbers are considerably higher.

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