Wings Over Scotland

We’ve already brought you the First Minister’s appearance on last night’s The Daily Show in the US, but in addition to the seven minutes that were shown on TV there were a further seven minutes of interview which didn’t go out on air, but were shown on the Comedy Central website, region-blocked so only US residents could see them.

When the FM goes abroad to represent Scotland in the outside world, though, we think it’s only fair that Scots get to see what she’s saying and doing on their behalf, so we didn’t let such trifling obstacles get in our way.

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The First Minister’s appearance on The Daily Show last night in full:

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The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.

Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.

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The likely next Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on today’s Sunday Politics:

We’ll try to keep this brief, because we want to go to the seaside.

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The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.

There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).

We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.

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There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.

The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.

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I had no time for the way that Charles Kennedy conducted himself in the referendum campaign and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did.

But before that he was one of the main reasons I voted Lib Dem for over 20 years – a compassionate, principled man who took some difficult stands and left his party in a far healthier place, both politically and morally, than it occupies now.

He deserves better than this.

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Because the media in Britain is now basically just a giant gossip circle repeating each other’s stories, pretty much every newspaper today repeats Michelle Mone’s tiresome publicity-seeking whinge about “cybernats” from the Mail On Sunday.

One of them is the Herald, whose piece contains a quote suggesting that Mone – who appeared to think that flitting from Scotland to England somehow got you away from the internet – does have at least some basic understanding of how Twitter works:

“I blocked all the ones who used the C word. All from the same party, surprise, surprise.”

Now, we’re going to assume that by “the C word” she meant the four-letter insult, and by “the same party” we can deduce from context that she must mean the SNP.

So let’s just see if that claim stands up to scrutiny.

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This is Robert Hutton – UK political correspondent for Bloomberg News and author of the book “Would They Lie To You?” – and former Labour spin doctor Damien McBride on Radio 4 this morning, discussing the fate of Alistair Carmichael.

(The Week In Westminster, BBC Radio 4, 30 May 2015)
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That’s going to be an awkward lunch.

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Michelle Mone, the titular head of a loss-making underwear company mostly owned by a shady Sri Lankan business group, who’s spent much of the last eight years trying to blackmail Scots by threatening to punish them with hundreds of job losses if they don’t vote the way she tells them to, has a 1400-word whine/house advert in the MoS today about how beastly cybernats have forced her to finally move to England.

Who wants to be the one to break it to her that they have Twitter in England too?

In its kneejerk “SNP BAD” reaction to the Alistair Carmichael affair, the Unionist establishment – politicians and media alike – has furiously tried to divert attention from Carmichael’s smear and attempted cover-up by harking back to an incident in 2012, when the press gave vast amounts of coverage to a claim that Alex Salmond had “lied” about legal advice regarding an independent Scotland’s EU membership.

Everyone and their dog has trotted out the allegation again in the past week, right across the Unionist political spectrum – “Steerpike” in the Spectator did it, Alex Johnstone of the Scottish Conservatives did it, Tavish Scott of the Scottish Lib Dems did it, Michael White in the Guardian did it, Toby Young in the Spectator (again) did it, thirsty Labour peer George Foulkes did it, Telegraph columnist Iain Martin did it, failed Lib Dem anti-Salmond candidate Christine Jardine did it, and countless numbers of shrill Scottish Labour activists and party officials did it.

And all of them are counting on the Scottish public not remembering the truth.

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