I know he’s a figure of comedy and pity, but this is something else.
Someone glue the cork in the bottle, eh? For his own good.
Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.
Here’s what we’ve got so far.
The Scottish Mail on Sunday’s shock-horror Forth Road Bridge story today is also accompanied by an editorial leader. And if the main article was a piece of bare-faced deception, it’s got nothing on the opinion piece.
We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve drawn people’s attention to the necessity of sticking with newspaper articles right to the end if you don’t want to be horribly misled by eye-catching headlines. But it never hurts to have another example.
If you only read the start of today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday “bombshell” on the Forth Road Bridge (the left side of the picture above), you might come to a very alarming conclusion. But if you get all the way through it, to the paragraphs we’ve highlighted in red and enlarged on the right-hand side of the image, you’ll discover the truth.
A strange phenomenon we’ve remarked upon a few times since the independence referendum is the inexplicable undying rage of a certain subset of Unionist voters.
Having won the vote, a casual observer might expect them to be happy, but instead they appear to exist in a constant state of fury.
(Our own best guess is that they were expecting to triumph by a crushing margin of two or three to one – some fretted that it might only be a 20-point victory – and then suffered the double blow of a much closer result that kept the Yes movement very much alive coupled with a massive surge in SNP membership and support.)
A demented anti-SNP tactical-voting campaign for this year’s general election – led by, among others, a frothing ultra-Loyalist-nutter-type by the name of Andrew Skinner – recorded one of the most spectacular failures in history as the Nats captured 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, only narrowly missing the other three, and the party’s poll ratings have continued to rise since then.
So this week, Mr Skinner decided to try for a more manageable target.
We’ve been struggling to get a good grip on what’s happening with the Forth Road Bridge this week. It’s a confusing tale full of contradictory financial and engineering detail, being flayed for all it’s worth by the Unionist media and opposition.
As usual, we’ll make this as simple as possible.
Comrades! Be upstanding and bow your heads to your superior, The Right Honourable The Lord Darling of Ruilanish, revolutionary socialist of Her Majesty:
Alert readers may recall a very recent incident where the Daily Record made baseless insinuations about a trip by former SNP MP Natalie McGarry to Syria, and whether its funding had been declared on the Parliamentary Register Of Members’ Interests.
(It had been, and the Record still hasn’t clarified its article to that effect.)
So here’s a thing.
Nil? Zero? Nothing at all? That seems… wrong.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
