Wings Over Scotland

Posted this morning, after a week in which it was so comprehensively proven to be a complete lie that even Torcuil Crichton of the Daily Record was forced to concede it.

You almost have to grudgingly admire the sheer bull-headed tenacity of their dogged determination to prove once and for all to the people of Scotland that Labour think they’re dribbling gullible morons.

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Only a few diehards in the press are still clinging this morning to the Labour fiction we exposed yesterday, namely the flat-out empirical falsehood that “the biggest party gets to form a government” in the event of a hung Parliament.

The Daily Record’s hapless political editor Torcuil Crichton desperately fought against the proven facts on Good Morning Scotland as an incredulous Iain Macwhirter looked on, and a few of the party’s more unhinged supporters battle on on social media, but after some diligent battering away with evidence it looks like we’ve finally managed to get the message through to most of a reluctant media.

But why was it ever in doubt?

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It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.

Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?

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We’re going to hold off full scrutiny and analysis of the Smith Commission report on devolution until it’s actually released and we’ve read it, rather than going on pure speculation like most Scottish newspapers this morning.

But what we CAN talk about is this.

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It is, in fairness, a fairly slow time for politics news at the moment. But it’s striking all the same to open this morning’s papers and see almost all of them running what’s not only basically the exact same story, but also the exact same groundless spin on it.

THE SCOTSMAN: “Jim Murphy tells Scots Labour to back tax powers”

DAILY RECORD: “Labour leadership frontrunner Jim Murphy set to back full income tax-raising powers for Holyrood”

THE GUARDIAN: “Scotland [is] to be offered total control over income tax after Labour U-turn. Labour’s policy shift will be confirmed on Tuesday by Jim Murphy, the favourite to become the next Scottish Labour leader.”

THE HERALD: “Murphy to support handing full income tax powers to Holyrood”

THE TIMES: “Murphy calls for full income tax devolution”

BBC NEWS: “Scottish Labour leadership candidate Jim Murphy is calling on his party to support the full devolution of income tax to Holyrood.”

STV NEWS: “Labour candidate Murphy calls for ‘full devolution of income tax'”

EVENING TIMES: “Murphy in call for full devolution of income tax”

There’s only one thing conspicuously missing from all of the stories – a quote from Jim Murphy saying he backs the devolution of full income tax powers to Holyrood.

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Voting No WON’T give you cancer at all, of course. (Although with the English NHS now privatising cancer care, with the likely knock-on effects on Scottish NHS funding, you’d better hope even harder that you don’t get it.)

The title on this article is in fact completely unrelated to the text you’re about to read, much like Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record.

Let’s take a look.

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And it appears we’ve found Torcuil Crichton’s.

It seems there’s to be no let-up in the Unionist/media campaign of vilification against Chris and Colin Weir – or “the Rich List Weirs”, as a nasty little comment piece by the Daily Record hack in today’s issue calls them. Let’s study those 51 sour wee words.

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The Daily Record’s run a whole clutch of articles of a vaguely positive nature towards independence recently, which is nice. We assume Torcuil Crichton must be ill. But an editorial leader column today commenting on the Yes campaign’s encouraging poll figures and identifying the SNP’s social-justice policy programme as the reason had an intriguing line buried in the middle of it.

“Only Labour can win this battle for the UK and they have to run up a red flag for Scotland and sail under it. If that is a different banner from the rest of the UK, so be it.”

Hang on. What does that mean, exactly?

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We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.

So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.

And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.

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Erk. I think spending a whole day crouched over a laptop on the floor trying to install Windows bloody 8 might have done me in, readers. Judging by the wracked state of my upper torso last night and this morning, for a while there I thought I was going to be bringing in 2014 with a heart attack. 

But anyway, as I’m plainly not going anywhere for a while, here are the best quotes of July! (Catch up: January, February, March, April, May, June.)

PS If you’re one of the IDIOTS who doesn’t follow us on Twitter, you’re missing out on the other highlights of the year, which we’re tweeting as we go along. (But you can just click that link to see the tweets without setting up your own account.)

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The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.

Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.

Today is one of those times.

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The realisation that the No camp’s reaction to the independence White Paper has been based on a massive, scarcely-believable misunderstanding/misrepresentation of reality has thrown a new light on all sorts of things from the past week.

The most recent “BLACK HOLE!” story is a case in point.

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