Unalert readers will have been startled to read in much of the media this morning – including a front-page piece on the Daily Record – of the “shocking” £100,000 cost of renaming the new Southern General hospital in Glasgow after the Queen.
That, of course, is because all the alert ones read it on Wings two days ago.
Yesterday, whatever the merits of the actual decision involved, we saw an admirable attitude to transparency and accountability from NHS Greater Glasgow And Clyde in their handling of our Freedom Of Information request about the renaming of the South Glasgow University Hospital. An extremely comprehensive response arrived promptly and without any attempts at evasion.
Today was different, because today we were dealing with the BBC.
And they say it’s “lefties” who are more interested in slogans than useful policies.
We’ve received a reply to the Freedom Of Information request we submitted to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde a few weeks ago with regard to the cost of renaming the new Southern General Hospital in Glasgow. The total cost of the renaming, the bulk of which was accounted for by the ceremony and three free-standing commemorative plaques, has been given as £100,486.
NHSGGC’s full statement can be read here.
There’s much noisy chat at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn being 20 points ahead of his Labour leadership rivals on first-preference votes. His rivals seem to agree; they’ve turned their main efforts to competing amongst themselves for second and third preference “stop Corbyn” votes.
But could any of them really close such a huge gap? And what if they don’t?
Alert readers will recall that this site has expended some energy on debunking the lazy myth – which suits the media and Labour alike – that a significant factor in the unexpected Conservative majority in May’s general election was voters being scared back to the Tories by a fear campaign about the prospect of the SNP influencing a minority Labour government.
Today we stumbled across an hour-long programme buried away in the depths of BBC Parliament, which televised “a seminar organised by Nuffield College Oxford at which leading academics and pollsters analyse the result of the General Election”.
The most interesting contribution came from a team at the University of Manchester who made two absolutely key findings from the extremely large and detailed British Election Study of the “short campaign” period, involving tens of thousands of voters.
Attention spans are brief these days, so we’ve cut it down to four minutes for you.
Michelle Mone, the fake-tan-and-diet-pills tycoon who threatened to leave Scotland if the SNP won the 2007 Holyrood election (but didn’t when they did), then threatened to leave if Yes won the referendum (but did when it didn’t), now lives in a very expensive flat by the Thames in London with a lovely view of Tower Bridge.
And boy, does she ever want you to know about it.
It’s three months since our last traffic-stats update, so we’re due again.
WINGS OVER SCOTLAND JULY 2015
Unique users: 308,314
(up 20,626 on June 2015, up 79,159 on July 2014)
Visits: 1,147,571
(up 90,453 on June 2015, up 229,604 on July 2014)
Page views: 4,732,038
(up 94,495 on June 2015, up 498,717 on July 2014)
Having failed over the course of several years to label the SNP “Nazis” and “fascists” (or, depending on which sort of newspaper you were reading, “Tartan Stalinists”), the party’s political and media opponents have a new(ish) meme to punt: that the SNP is a religious cult made up of credulous, fanatical zealots impervious to logic or facts.
The leader of this new front is right-wing columnist Alex Massie, who by our count has managed to flog someone this diatribe at least four times already this year – the most recent being in yesterday’s Times:
But he’s far from alone.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
