Wings Over Scotland

It’s a rare occasion when we feel compelled to salute Scotland’s mainstream media, but their restraint on discovering that a whole slew of PFI schools commissioned by Labour might be in danger of falling down at any moment was highly commendable.

Restricting themselves merely to excising all mention of Labour from their coverage, the press admirably refused to somehow contort the issue into a shape that could be used to attack the SNP.

They kept temptation at bay for a solid 24 hours before they cracked.

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The Unionist parties are taking such a kicking in the polls for next month’s Holyrood election that you could forgive them for not always knowing where they were.

The above tweet does indeed have the potential to be “astonishing”, given that (a) Ruth Davidson isn’t standing in Carnoustie, and (b) the 2011 result suggests that there are only around 700 Labour voters to find in the entire town behind the “1000s” of doors that 20 Tories have impressively managed to knock by teatime.

(Indeed, the area is so Labour-unfriendly that the Tories actually managed to come 2nd five years ago, getting over 50% more votes than the Labour candidate.)

But it’s not the only piece of geographical confusion afflicting the UK parties.

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Alert readers may recall that a few months ago the Scottish press got itself in a right old lather about a temporary closure of the Forth Road Bridge. The SNP were attacked relentlessly in the media for what a subsequent inquiry in fact found to have been an “unforeseeable” fault on the bridge which posed no risk to life. But fair enough.

This week, 17 schools in the Edinburgh area were closed down over fears that they might be unsafe after the wall of one of them fell off in high winds, two years after another wall in an Edinburgh school collapsed and killed a 12-year-old girl.

All 17 had been built under a controversial PFI scheme signed in 2001, when the UK government, Scottish Parliament and Edinburgh City Council were all controlled by Labour, and which isn’t due to be finally paid off for another 20 years.

You know where this is going, right?

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The Scottish press and opposition’s incandescent and somewhat vague fury at the Scottish Government working to bring billions of pounds in investment to Scotland has continued undiminished in this weekend’s newspapers. Scottish Labour in particular are getting themselves very worked up about today’s Sunday Times.

“Incredible”? Sounds exciting. Let’s find out more.

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Poor old Daily Record.

What a distance to fall.

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Those of you who read our post of earlier today probably didn’t feel there was anything ambiguous going on in it. When Ruth Davidson intervened in an election debate to protest that the chair, the BBC’s Louise White, was being unfair to Nicola Sturgeon, it was pretty obvious who she meant, and White’s response removed any doubt.

Which makes this eye-witness account of the event, spotted by an alert reader this afternoon, odd in several ways.

Let’s count them up.

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We were rather gobsmacked, readers, when we tuned into this morning’s BBC Radio Scotland phone-in at 9am. Ostensibly discussing the promotion of “Rangers” to the Premiership, presenter Louise White adopted the most astonishingly, openly partisan and aggressive approach we’ve ever heard from a host on the state broadcaster (which is no small feat), on the subject of whether the club was a new one or not.

Callers were harangued, interrupted and hustled on for daring to suggest the truth. It was a jaw-dropping display of disregard for not only impartiality but basic journalistic regard for the plain, uncontestable facts of the matter.

But don’t panic, football-haters. This post is about something else.

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Right then, we need to start sorting this out.

And it needs doing in an orderly way.

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Kezia Dugdale, 7 March 2016:

Let’s just run that one through the ol’ Checkalizer 5000.

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Goes to the BBC, for this cracker on Friday.

That is some arch satire right there, Auntie. Well done.

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This is an intriguing and engrossing extended chat between Christopher Silver and Iain Macwhirter for what will hopefully become a regular series by the excellent Phantom Power Films, creators of Altered States and lots more:

It’s well worth whiling away a little bit of your afternoon on.