Wings Over Scotland

We’ll be honest with you here, readers – even though it’s only July, when it comes to sheer ham-fisted, tin-eared, clown-shoed, foot-shooting idiocy we didn’t think anything in Scottish politics in 2017 could possibly top the SNP’s decision that the surefire way to win back voters after a poor election result was literally mutilating puppies.

After all, that’s the sort of thing you say as a self-evidently ludicrous and hyperbolic joke: “Ha ha, the SNP are so dominant in Scotland these days that the only way they could lose an election would be if Nicola Sturgeon went on telly and started hacking the tails off week-old puppy-dogs without anaesthetic! LOL!!!!!”

It couldn’t even be defended as a grotesque but cynically cunning attempt to win votes from the rural hunting-and-fishing lobby – they did it right AFTER the election, when all those people had just gone out and voted Tory anyway.

But bless their hearts, Scottish Labour never once saw a low bar that they didn’t try to slither under, and today they pulled off the seemingly impossible.

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Broadly speaking, the psychological phenomenon known as the Pollyanna Principle is a tendency to neurotically see the most positive possible view of a situation. It’s not generally widely found in newspapers – for whom bad news as a rule sells much better than good news – but for some reason the Scottish press makes a uniform exception when it comes to military shipbuilding.

This, for example, is today’s Herald:

Now, in itself that headline is – unusually – true, so far as it goes. But it only takes until the first sentence of the article text before things start to fall apart.

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From today’s Daily Record:

Have you spotted Kindly Uncle Jez’s mistake, readers?

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Today the BBC finally officially revealed what everyone already knew.

So now Scottish viewers definitely know where we stand.

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:

If only there was somewhere that Labour DID already run the NHS so that we could judge the truth of that claim, eh readers?

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Deep in the summer news desert, the papers today are struggling for material again. The Sunday Herald has a shock-horror front-page exposé about some photos from an Orange Lodge party that turn out to be from 2010 and 2013, while the Scottish Mail On Sunday reaches all the way back to 1940 to fill a couple of pages.

But the Sunday Mail’s timing is even weirder.

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And no, we’re not talking about Ruth Davidson living it up at Fingers Piano Bar. Kezia Dugdale tweeted this today:

Which would be a little bit like us gloating that Andy Murray was rubbish at tennis on the grounds that he was knocked out of Wimbledon this week.

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We already knew what David Mundell’s guarantees were worth, of course. So it’s not like we can exactly feign surprise at this.

The best we can say is that at least this time it took four months for the Secretary Of State’s promise to completely and utterly collapse, not 48 hours.

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In a month of positive statistics for Scotland – including unexpectedly high economic growth figures, continuing to lead the UK and hitting its own tough targets for hospital waiting times (which drew an incredibly petty and insulting response from Scottish Labour), and huge progress in rail punctuality (now also the best anywhere in the country) – perhaps the most welcome of all was the release yesterday of the lowest unemployment figures for quarter of a century.

(Again the best in the UK, and in fact the best in Scotland of all time, since separate Scottish records only started to be kept in 1992.)

The Scotsman commendably gave the glad tidings top billing on its front page.

But despite it being slow news season, the rest of the media was a little less excited.

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We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.

But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.

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It’s a sleepy Wednesday in July, so let’s celebrate some proud British culture!

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