Wings Over Scotland

It’s a comprehensive policy document focused on local issues wait no.

We mean the other thing.

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times, about a cunning plan by which the Scottish Government could bypass the veto of Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and legislate for a second independence referendum – forcing a direct showdown in which the UK government would have to openly trample the Scottish Parliament and its electoral mandate.

If pursued, it would reopen the current absurd argument in which the Unionist parties claim that the Scottish Government has no “mandate” to pursue a second referendum, despite mandates arising solely from the ability to win votes in Parliament.

(If an absolute majority for one party was required to pass legislation, Holyrood would of course have done absolutely nothing for most of its life.)

And that reminded us that our last Panelbase opinion poll was so vast we still hadn’t finished releasing the results of it, including one rather surprising finding.

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Yesterday we noted that while Scotland’s opposition parties and Unionist media were united in the staunch belief that the Scottish Government should do something to improve the poorly-performing economy over which it has almost no control, none of them seemed able to offer so much as a single actual policy they wanted changed or implemented to this end.

Today the Daily Mail continued the attack at length:

So we thought we’d see if anyone had come up with anything yet.

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We’ve been trying to take advantage of the current lull in politics, with Holyrood in recess for Easter, to have a bit of a semi-break. Having to watch all the Unionist party conferences in March is always toxic to the soul, and with the gargantuan torrent of insane lies emanating from the indyref2 and Article 50 developments to deal with as well, this year’s was even grimmer than usual.

So when all the papers went heavy on this morning’s news that the Scottish economy had a slight retraction in the last quarter of 2016 and filled their pages with rentaquote drivel from the opposition parties about how it was all the SNP’s fault, our first instinct was to simply direct readers back to this piece from last October, detailing how the Scottish Government – by design – controls almost none of Scotland’s meaningful economic levers, and go to the movies again.

But then a headline in the Scotsman’s article changed our minds. Because we thought we should see which policies they actually wanted changed.

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We just got this email from a reader. We can’t verify it, but have no reason to doubt it.

We thought you’d like to know, though.

Unionists were barely able to hide their excitement last month at the thought of some dead pensioners. This was former Labour MSP Dr Richard Simpson, for example:

(Simpson later went on to embellish the claim by saying that it had in fact reversed.)

The story was serious enough to be the Sunday Times Scotland front page lead.

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Actually, mighty King Leonidas is understating here. It was 311% in the end.

Wings Over Scotland 2017 fundraiser total: £140,047.

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A terrible article in today’s Observer nevertheless helpfully provides the most utterly categorical refutation yet of the endlessly-repeated Unionist lie that Spain would veto an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

The piece ran under the blatantly untrue headline “Spain drops plan to impose veto if Scotland tries to join EU” – it has NEVER had such a plan – and went on to propagate a whole series of further falsehoods asserted without any basis by reporter Jennifer Rankin, but such a spectaculary direct and unambiguous quote bangs yet another nail into a coffin that only the very stupidest of the nation’s pundits are still trying to insist contains a living occupant.

So let’s collect everything in one handy place.

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Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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On today’s Good Morning Scotland, a Tory MSP (in this case seven-time voter reject Murdo Fraser) was allowed to repeatedly get away unchallenged – for about the 100th time on broadcast media in recent days – with telling the flat-out lie that opinion polls show a clear and large majority in opposition to the Scottish Government’s position and proposed timing on a second independence referendum.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 31 March 2017)
.

We’ve endlessly shown these claims to be absolutely and categorically false, yet for some reason that we’re unable to explain, no interviewer has ever stopped Fraser, or Adam Tomkins, or Ruth Davidson, or Jackson Carlaw, and pointed that fact out.

Today, a tiny bar buried on a left-hand page in the Herald delivers yet more proof of public support for the Scottish Government’s stance.

It deserves rather more prominence, and while we’re about it we figured we might as well collect some of the evidence together.

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