This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.
The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.
Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.
Some new data from the long-running Scottish Social Attitudes Survey was released tonight, and it makes for fascinating reading.
The headline stat is that for only the second year in the 18 years the study has been running, independence is the most popular option for the governance of Scotland:
This doesn’t, however, mean that it’s the majority view, because while independence is backed by 45% the “No” option is split into two – support for devolution (41%) and those ultra-Yoons who want Holyrood abolished (8%).
Now, considering that as recently as 2012 those figures were independence on 23%, devolution 61% and no Parliament 13%, that’s still a remarkable shift in Scottish public opinion in a very short space of time – support for indy has DOUBLED in five years while devolution has dropped by a third.
And indeed, when the survey asked a straight Yes/No question the results came out even closer, at 48% Yes to 52% No – a 3% swing to Yes from the 2016 figures.
We must admit, folks, that our initial reaction to this Scotsman headline from a couple of days ago was simply a weary sigh of “Oh FFS, here we go again”.
Blaming the Scottish Government for a private company’s decision to close down its plant and make hundreds of Scottish workers redundant is just the sort of ludicrous negative spinning we’ve come to expect from the country’s press over the past seven years, so this latest example just seemed like nothing more than par for the course.
But there turned out to be a little more to it than that.
So this story is the front page of tonight’s Evening Times.
It’s a pretty slim piece deploying a Glasgow mother to attack the SNP-run city council over a recent increase in nursery fees, and it sounds like the new higher cost might be a pretty big deal to her.
And no, we don’t even mean the FOUR spelling mistakes in this 42-word tweet.
We mean the bit that we’ve highlighted above in blue. Because what Scottish Labour’s lowest-watt bulb was gloating about earlier today was that Lord Bracadale concluded there’d been no gap created in the law by the Kelly-driven abolition of the OBFA.
And that’s… well, that’s not quite what Lord Bracadale said.
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