Wings Over Scotland

So this morning, four days after our entire YouTube channel was deleted at the behest of the BBC, and after days of wrestling with YouTube’s shambolic robot-staffed admin maze, we finally managed to get an email out of them with the full list of what the BBC had complained about.

(If you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, we can recommend contacting @TeamYouTube on Twitter, who appear to be actual human people and can eventually prod the robots into action.)

The signatory was a London-based BBC lawyer, who’d plucked 13 videos apparently at random from the hundreds on our channel and decided to whine about them (citing US copyright law, rather than UK) up to four and a half years later.

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So what we only suspected is now official. In a response to The National, the BBC have confirmed that they were behind the termination of this site’s YouTube channel.

We have to admit, that “irrespective of the political views” line is a classic.

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Large sections of the Scottish media today trot out Variant #26 of the fortnightly “NHS SCOTLAND CRISIS!” story, namely the targets for A&E waiting times. The BBC, for example, goes with this:

While the Sunday Mail runs a remarkably similar piece except with more Anas Sarwar.

And that’s all fair enough – it’s a legitimate news story. But what’s really odd about it is that both of the articles leave out what you might imagine would be a rather crucial piece of information.

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As we’re writing this, our YouTube channel remains dead. We’re still trying to navigate through YouTube’s awful maze of robotic guards to reach a human being, and while at least two newspapers – The National and the Scotsman – have asked the BBC for a comment, none has been forthcoming.

The mainstream media’s attacks on this site in the last couple of years have included getting our Twitter account shut down in 2016, getting me arrested, having all of Wings’ electronic equipment confiscated by the police and now killing our YouTube channel full of crucial documentary evidence, most of which isn’t available anywhere else. (On top of an endless catalogue of smear stories and hatchet jobs, of course.)

Now, we’re not planning on going anywhere, but in the face of such a concerted and increasingly sinister assault aimed at silencing us, we also can’t make any guarantees that Wings itself will continue to survive. WordPress may prove as fragile in the face of malice as Twitter and YouTube have.

So in case we fall victim to another unexpected technical/censorship catastrophe, or suddenly commit “suicide”, you might want to strengthen the rest of the team.

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We happened to be looking at a couple of old articles this morning, and noticed that some of them had blank spaces where videos should be.

We didn’t think much of it at first, because people do sometimes delete old videos or shut down their accounts, but when we checked one of them we discovered it was hosted on the Wings Over Scotland channel.

Or rather, it USED to be, because our YouTube channel isn’t there any more.

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An alert reader sent us a piece of interesting follow-up info to yesterday’s piece on NHS Scotland costs. Because comparable figures for NHS England are available too, and they make for surprising reading.

These are the Scottish figures for medicine costs at list price, ie before any negotiated discounts that the health service is able to obtain:

The population of England, at 55 million, is just over 10 times that of Scotland (5.4m). So one would imagine that its like-for-like costs would come in at around £12 billion.

But they don’t.

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We’ve just been leaked this short clip of a secret UK government exercise preparing for the week after Brexit.

We’re sure everything will be fine and no drastic measures will be required.

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The BBC front page headline for this is actually just the alarming-sounding “Scottish prescription costs rise by 25%”, without even the qualifier about the timespan.

It’s worse than that, though.

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If you vote Scottish Labour:

And if you vote Scottish Conservative:

Always good to know.

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It’s probably overdue that we start collecting these together. So here’s Sir John Major on the Andrew Marr show yesterday, explaining why a “once in a lifetime” referendum should in fact be held again because its outcome was determined by something that turned out to be untrue.

Which is, of course, totally different to Scotland being told to vote No in 2014 in order to stay in the European Union, because [REASONS TO FOLLOW AT SOME POINT]

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