Wings Over Scotland

(And finally… #26)

If only someone would come and free us from the burden of these terrible riches.

It’s nice to see Scottish Labour taking turns. Today it’s Richard Baker who’s been wheeled out to spout idiotic and instantly-disproveable untruths at the Scottish public.

Shall we?

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When the Daily Record lost Magnus Gardham to the Herald, they made sure to call on a like-for-like replacement. Torcuil Crichton, the newspaper’s self-styled “man in Westminster” (and who has never approved a single comment on his political blog in almost five years), is Gardham’s only rival as the most virulently and overtly Unionist staff reporter – as opposed to opinion columnist – in the Scottish media.

A story under Mr Crichton’s name today, though, is unsubtle even by his standards.

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Power Of Scotland is a newspaper about the power industry, given away as a business supplement with The Times. An alert contributor pointed us to an intriguing article in the latest edition from regular Scotsman columnist Peter Jones, offering a more nuanced account of the industry’s view of independence than you might expect.

If you’re pressed for time we’ve pulled out a couple of the more interesting passages.

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A creative reader writes in to notify us of these splendid-looking mugs, and to pledge that all profits (about 45% of the sale price) will be donated to our fundraiser.

Frankly we’re taking them at their word on the second part, but either way they seem a rather excellent thing to have in your home.

This is why Gran Turismo games make me sad.

Racing games are one of the few remaining mainstream genres where (with the exception of the Need For Speed series and a handful of others) the player plays as themselves, rather than as a predefined character in a story. As a result, personalities are rather thin on the ground – if anything, the cars are the stars.

But nobody wants to read 800 words about the Nissan Skyline (nobody who doesn’t urgently need drowning in a bucket, anyway), so instead let's focus our attention on something altogether more beautiful, in every possible way.

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It’s weird watching the Sunday papers all decrying the media’s handling of Wednesday’s leaked Scottish Government document. Everyone seems to agree that the Cabinet paper wasn’t any kind of smoking gun – the consensus is that John Swinney’s comments were sensible, cautious and largely misrepresented in the press.

Eddie Barnes in Scotland on Sunday, for example, noted that “Few of the issues presented within the report were in any way revelatory” (though it didn’t stop him from referring to them as “revelations” later in the piece anyway), but then diffidently observed that they “produced a disastrous set of headlines”, as if his own publication hadn’t written any of them, and as if it wasn’t continuing to do so on the very same day Barnes’ piece hit the newsstands.

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Poe’s Law, which we only discovered on Wikipedia this morning, says that “without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between sincere extremism and an exaggerated parody of extremism”. Or in other words, there’s a name for when people are so batshit crazy you can’t satirise them, because you simply couldn’t invent anything madder than what they say for real.

It’s in that context we invite readers to consider a recent story in the Scottish Sun.

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We’ve just had to have a bit of a sit down after trying in vain to get our heads around the dizzying spin deployed in a story in this morning’s Herald, which appears to utilise some form of crazed Catch 22 to ensure that no matter whether an independent Scotland was stony broke or rolling in cash, it’d still end up skint.

We’ll give you a moment to guess who wrote it, and then we’re going to step through the piece line by line and see if we can figure out what sort of madness is afoot.

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Catastrophe! Scottish independence (surely “separation”?) will destroy your old-age pension, says yesterday’s Scottish Daily Express.

We suppose we better vote No to keep them safe, then.

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This is a thing that really just happened.

“Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher will have a statue erected in her honour in her home town of Grantham in Lincolnshire.

A plan to raise more than £200,000 for a statue and renovation project at the Grantham Museum has been unveiled.

Labour councillors had called for a town centre statue after the Conservative-majority authority voted against the move last week.“

Emphasis ours, because otherwise you’ll probably think you read it wrong.

An alert reader gives us advance notice that the BBC are planning a live online readers’-question-and-answer session with Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Something to coincide with the Scottish Lib Dem spring conference next week. Here’s the one we submitted – we feel sure the BBC will select it to ask him.

“Mr Rennie, do you think it’s conducive to a constructive debate to insultingly refer to people who disagree with you as ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’, as you did in response to the recent vote in favour of independence by a large branch of the postal-workers’ union which covered your own parliamentary region? Would it have been acceptable for Blair Jenkins or Nicola Sturgeon to dismiss all the Glasgow University students who voted No in their mock referendum as ‘daft wee kids who don’t know anything about life’?”

Why not send in yours too?