Wings Over Scotland

What Tories are, in two images from one week.

Never forget it until the day you die, readers.

This is Kezia Dugdale in the Daily Record today:

But with the greatest respect to Scotland’s pioneering engineers, they’re not the thing we’re reminded of when we hear Scottish Labour talking about the new bridge. This is what we’re reminded of.

The Sunday Times has a breathless account today of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant five-day tour of Scotland.

It sounds like quite the event.

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This site is still hampered by the consequences of TotallyUnbelievableMadnessGate, so until normal service is resumed here’s a quick recap of a few stories from the last few days you may have missed.

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This morning sees the release of another set of GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) figures accompanied, no doubt, by the usual strange hybrid of sneering and cringing from Unionist politicians braying proudly that we’re too small, too subsidised and too stupid to ever look after our own country.

So as the annual circus act gets under way again, for a little perspective we took a quick look at Scotland’s actual standing in the international community.

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We’ll only be making a very brief comment on the story in Tuesday’s Herald, for hopefully obvious reasons. The piece by Tom Gordon has been written for maximum innuendo to allow the wildest speculations on social media – which are of course duly taking place – but the alleged events relate entirely to some tweets from our Twitter account, none of which have been deleted and all of which are still publicly visible.

Nothing more sinister or serious than some tweets has occurred, or been alleged to have occurred. None of the tweets involved are in ANY way threatening, not even in a joking sense. That’s all we’ll be saying on the subject at this time.

With this year’s GERS figures imminent, there are two stories about North Sea oil in today’s papers which are markedly different in both tone and honesty.

This, for example, is the front page of the Sunday Herald:

It’s basically a reprise of a Wings story from almost a year ago, noting that despite producing broadly similar amounts of oil to Scotland from the North Sea, Norway has generated tens of billions in pounds in government revenue from it – even during the price slump of recent years – while Scotland has actually LOST money.

The Sunday Times, though, has a rather different take.

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Number of references to “UK”, “Britain” or “British” in this story about salmon: 17

Number of references to “Scotland” or “Scottish”: 1 (in a quote)

Percentage of “UK” salmon industry that’s actually in Scotland: 96.3%

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(By the always-excellent Phantom Power Films.)

To be honest with you, readers, we’re still trying to make some sort of sense of the whole “vote Scottish Labour to get independence” thing. Because try as we might we can’t think of a single way in which having a Scottish Labour MP is better than having an SNP one in terms of either independence OR socialism.

And it doesn’t take a lot of effort to see why.

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The mainstream media is now, by our count, up to at least 13 sizeable articles on the Great Yes-Movement Schism Of 2017 – a minor online spat between a tiny handful of people who’ve never liked each other and most of whom the general public has never heard of – and shows no signs of tiring of gleefully revelling in the subject.

There’s nothing particularly surprising or even diabolical about that. As any reality-TV show viewer will tell you, viewers absolutely love to watch people fighting, and doubly so if it’s the summer silly season and there’s no real news. Most of the stories have attracted large responses and therefore lots of juicy and profitable clicks for tired hacks who long ago stopped having anything of any interest to say but still have to honk out 1000 words a week in order to get paid.

But the more sinister aspect of them is the way they’ve been weaponised to (further) demonise and silence the Yes movement. If someone attacks other Yes figures with a provocative, offensive and dishonest piece, the extra bonus for the media is that any legitimately angry response to it can be used as yet more proof of The Vileness Of The Cybernats: “Look! They even turn on their own if they dare disagree!”

For the Unionist press, that’s a win-win every way up, and there are some on the Yes side who seem only too willing to co-operate with the narrative.

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