Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been through all the papers and there’s still absolutely no Scottish politics news, so we’re going to take a moment out for one of our brief but always-popular tangential forays into the world of football. All the usual disclaimers apply.

Because the parlous state of current Scottish journalism can’t just be observed on the politics pages, with all their partisan spin, quarter-truths and hackery. Sometimes you get a better idea of it by stepping back and looking at the broader picture, and rarely is that picture more clear than when it’s a picture of “Rangers”.

The Daily Record devoted only a tiny corner of its back page on Thursday to the club’s latest financial reports, and the bulk of the text was devoted to Dave King enthusing about what great news it all was.

Pretty much every other piece of coverage to be found in the Scottish press was the same, shrugging the figures off as of no notable significance and all someone else’s fault anyway (in this case former manager Pedro Caixinha, even though one must suppose he didn’t spend any more money than the board told him he could), and we waited in vain for any in-depth analysis in the Sundays.

And we couldn’t help thinking we’d been here before.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s been a tough few days for the Daily Record. So maybe we should forgive this:

Let’s just enjoy those pie charts for a moment.

Read the rest of this entry →

While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

Read the rest of this entry →

Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.

One man, of course, led from the front.

Ouch.

As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers in two decades of being an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.

Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the first posts we ever wrote on Wings Over Scotland, back in November 2011, recorded the fact that total daily sales of newspapers in Scotland had dipped below a million for the first time ever (to a total of 986,657).

The six-and-a-half years that have followed have been probably the most tumultuous in Scottish history – an independence referendum, a Brexit referendum and the death of Rangers, to name but three of the significant events that have taken place in just two-thirds of a single decade.

At the very least, then, you’d imagine that the period might have given the declining newspaper industry one last dead cat bounce.

The like-for-like sales total of the same newspapers today is 492,353.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s always nice to see Michelle Mone in the news again, especially when the Tory peer crowbars an attempted intervention into Scottish politics into everything she does.

And since there’s not much else going on, it seemed like a good excuse to have a wee delve into what she’s been up to lately.

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the uglier facets of opposition to the hugely-popular but now-repealed Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act was the 100% uniform stance against it in the Scottish press. Despite the Act being backed by a large majority of voters across every demographic and political divide, not one print or broadcast journalist ever stood up for the public.

The reason, of course, is that bigots (and lurid stories about them) are a large part of what keeps the Scottish media’s life support machine functioning, and so the media panders cynically to the extremist sections of the Celtic and “Rangers” support who still buy papers for the latest transfer gossip and soft-soap interviews with ex-players.

And so it is with a remarkably mad front-page lead in today’s Sunday Herald.

The paper reports that “over half” – 44 out of 86 – outstanding OBFA charges have been “converted” into other types of offences and are still being prosecuted by the independent Crown Office, claiming without explanation that this is “an embarrassing move for the SNP Government”.

But it rather seems like the opposite is true.

Read the rest of this entry →

Let there be no mistake about what just happened. Last night, Scottish devolution – an institution 111 years in the promising, just 19 years a reality – died. Iain Macwhirter summed it up concisely and accurately.

And it didn’t even go down fighting.

Read the rest of this entry →

We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!

At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.

And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.

Read the rest of this entry →

Presented without comment, covering a period of THREE major national referendums, EIGHT elections (UK, Scottish, EU, council) and of course the death of Rangers.

What we’re saying is, it’s not like there wasn’t any news.

(Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Which we were yesterday, we couldn’t help noticing this:

And that reminded us that we still had some more poll results to reveal.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re a bit annoyed about this, because we were going to give the Absolute Fanny Of The Week award to Anas Sarwar every week as a joke, but now it seems we can’t.

So that’s a professional journalist who’s studied the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, or OBFA, so intently and diligently that he keeps calling it “OBAF” instead. But that’s not the stupidest of it.

Read the rest of this entry →