Wings Over Scotland

Normally we enjoy a little chuckle at Kevin McKenna’s weekly column in the Guardian, as befits one of the stalwarts of our Zany Comedy Relief link section. On taking an early peek at this week’s effort, it looked to be one of those rare occasions when Kevin takes a break from slagging off the SNP and talks about something else, but instead we were horrified to witness one of the most despicable things we’ve seen in the mainstream “quality” press for quite some time.

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If your fingers exert even the slightest amount of pressure on the pulse of the mobile-gaming zeitgeist, the image below is going to set your deja-vu-sense a-tingling.

If there's one thing you can't accuse App Store developers of, it's being slow to rip off a success story. In this case, the success story in question is the astonishing overnight smash-hit Draw Something, which exploded into the news so dramatically that notorious idea-pirates Zynga (the same company who shamelessly cloned Tiny Tower) actually opted to pay a rumoured $210m for the company who made it rather than just banging out their own hasty barefaced knock-off like they usually would.

The game in our picture is functionally all but identical to Draw Something, except with more features. You get extra drawing tools and lots more colours to play with, and there are extra game modes on top of the straightforward turn-based picture exchange of OMGPOP's No.1 phenomenon. (Which in fact barely qualifies as a "game" at all, but that's another feature entirely.) The funny thing, though, is that it ISN'T a knock-off.

It's a game that came out two months BEFORE Draw Something, is basically exactly the same but superior to it in almost every way, yet has conspicuously failed to earn so much money that its bewildered creators can do little but giggle all day at their insane good fortune. Why? Well, of course we can't say for absolute certain. But we'd be happy to wager a pretty substantial amount of money on the fact that some complete dogturd-brained demi-wit decided to lumber it with the name Charadium II.

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The Tories blow £110,000 on tea and biscuits in a single department in three months:

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Alex Salmond pays for two cups of tea and two Caramel Wafers out of his own pocket and makes £1m profit in a single afternoon:

Is it any wonder the canny Scottish people would rather have the clever First Minister running their country than the hapless Tories?

So another 24 hours go by, and still absolutely nobody in the Scottish media thinks it at all newsworthy that the country's main opposition party has a deliberate policy of refusing to support ANY Parliamentary motion put forward by the SNP, regardless of its merits. We wish we were more surprised.

Scotland Tonight, which at least engages with its viewers on Twitter, claimed its reporting team were "not excited" by the astonishing revelation, openly and publicly made by a Labour MP, that Scotland's second-biggest political party was more interested in party advantage than the interests of the people. Newsnight Scotland and Reporting Scotland both ignored the story, as did all of the nation's newspapers.

The Herald and Scotsman did both run tiny pieces on the less-interesting prelude that brought the news to light (Labour's ham-fisted refusal to vote against George Osborne's 50p tax cut for the rich), but neither could find even half a sentence in passing to mention the much more significant discovery of the Bain Principle.

The other story covered by Wings over Scotland yesterday DID manage to secure a lot more media attention, though. Following on from the Telegraph and Caledonian Mercury, both Scottish broadsheets were able to find large amounts of space to repeat the powderpuff story about Alex Salmond offering a couple of long-standing SNP members a cup of tea and a biscuit in Bute House.

The Herald put it on the front page – in a piece so poorly researched and edited that it managed to knock £30m off the value of the Weirs' Euromillions jackpot (repeatedly giving the amount as £131m rather than the actual £161m) – and presented the story as dramatically as possible, giving plenty of space to Labour's Paul Martin to make lurid accusations which the paper depicted neutrally (Martin merely "said" things) while it portrayed the SNP spokesman's response as angry and defensive, using phrases like "The First Minister's most senior aide stormed…" and "reacted with fury" .

The Scotsman, meanwhile, outdid its rival with TWO separate stories, featuring on the front page of the website and as the lead item in each of the "Scotland", "UK" and "Politics" sections. And this, remarkably, happened despite the paper also running a leader column which explicitly noted that the Weirs' donation did NOT belong in the same category as those that have been solicited and/or covered up by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems:

"At the heart of this affair there is a serious problem for political parties. They need money to run expensive campaigns. People who give large sums of money tend to be those who do not hand over cash without expecting something in return. There are people who simply believe in the party cause – the lottery winners who have given £1m to the SNP, for example – but they are few and far between."

It probably goes without saying that the Daily Record also managed to cover the Weirs' so-called "tea party", and it also ran it twice – though it should be noted that both pieces were handled rather more soberly and even-handedly than either of its two supposedly more grown-up counterparts – but didn't consider either Willie Bain's admission or Labour's tax-rate abstention to be worthy of even a few lines.

Supporters of independence are often accused of paranoia by the Scottish media, but no belief is paranoid if it's true. The embarrassingly transparent attempt by the press to bury the story of the Bain Principle, while devoting page after page after page to repeatedly casting aspersions on an entirely legitimate, open and above-board donation which the SNP conspicuously announced the moment it happened and which absolutely everyone accepts was not made with any ulterior motive or seeking any benefit, will do nothing but fuel the nationalists' fire.

As the fallout from Cruddasgate continues, it's instructive to watch the attempts of both the Unionist parties and the media to drag the SNP through the mud along with the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems. The print and online media have both had a stab today, with the Telegraph running a lengthy piece about Alex Salmond inviting lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir for a cup of tea at Bute House before they made a £1m donation to the SNP, and the Caledonian Mercury picking up the same story as part of a Hamish Macdonell op-ed.

The latter is the more interesting, on account of a couple of somewhat contradictory paragraphs in it. About halfway down the column, Macdonell makes this assertion:

"The issue here is not the money or where it comes from. The issue here is the nature of what is being promised by the parties in return for these donations."

And it's a very fair point. Nobody sensible is objecting to people giving money to political parties in itself. Donations are absolutely vital to the continued functioning of our political system as it stands. There are (deeply unpopular) arguments to be made about changing that system to one of public funding, and there are arguments against having political parties (rather than individual members) at all, but neither scenario is currently the case, so parties need donations. Nothing wrong with that.

As Macdonell correctly points out, the issue is whether those donations are being used to influence policy in favour of vested (usually commercial) interests. But if that's the case, what are the Weirs doing in the story? Macdonell's demand that:

"If the UK’s most successful lottery winners are invited in for tea with the first minister before offering the SNP a huge donation, that should be declared."

…makes no sense in the stated context of influence being the issue. There's no suggestion that the Weirs sought to influence any SNP policy. As former SNP activists it's probably fair to assume that they already support most of the party's aims, and it's hard to see what benefit they could possibly be seeking in return, being as they're already sitting on a bank account with 160 million quid in it.

We have no argument with the broad thrust of the CalMerc piece. We're all in favour of transparency when it comes to donations. But then, the SNP made no secret of the Weirs' donation – indeed, it'd be fair to say they shouted it from the rooftops. So whether the First Minister entertained them to a cuppa and a Caramel Wafer beforehand is neither here nor there. Actively soliciting contributions is not in itself the slightest bit underhand – every party does it openly every day.

The Weirs have no place in any story about dodgy donations. They are not a business, and are not seeking favours in return for their money. They are Scottish citizens and residents, not foreigners prohibited by law from giving money to politicial parties. And the First Minister, it seems, actively sought them out, rather than them paying for access to him in order to lobby the Scottish Government for their own ends.

But just as with the expenses scandal, the forces of Unionism will not be dissuaded by such trivialities as the relevant facts as they try to haul the SNP into the pit of sleaze alongside the London parties. As ever, we recommend reading the pro-Union press – if you must read it at all – through a very long lens.

The story isn't, of course, that Labour failed to vote against the 50p tax-rate cut when the SNP and Plaid Cymru put forward a motion in the House Of Commons. The truth that it was a "screw-up" is entirely believable in the light of Labour's general ineptitude, and not that big a deal in itself. The rate cut was happening anyway no matter whether Labour voted on the motion or not, and in the flurry of essentially meaningless post-Budget motions, missing out on one of them is pretty insignificant.

Had Labour left it at that, a compliant Scottish media would probably have seen them get away with it altogether, as they'd hoped. (Even now, more than 36 hours later, only the Scotsman has covered it at all, in a tiny little story with no byline buried near the bottom of the Politics section.)

But then Willie Bain stepped in. Late on Tuesday night, the MP for Glasgow North East responded to some criticism of Labour's abstention on Twitter, with an admission of what many in Scotland have long suspected/known – that Labour opposes anything proposed by the SNP, regardless of the merits of the thing in question.

The SNP, unsurprisingly, summed the comment up in uncompromising terms:

“It is clear that Labour hates the SNP much more than it loves Scotland. Even when it came to voting against a Tory tax cut for millionaires, Labour could not put its resentment of the SNP aside in the interests of ordinary working people."

But we'll charitably assume that Bain's extraordinary on-the-record revelation (he hasn't deleted the tweet, though it's impossible to say if that's out of honour or a recognition of the futility of trying to delete internet trails) occurred too late at night for the Scottish press to have picked it up in time for the morning editions. We'll be watching closely, though, to see if tonight's TV and tomorrow's papers consider it in any way newsworthy that Scotland's Labour MPs are now by their own acknowledgement more concerned with pettily fighting the SNP than serving the interests of their voters.

The Scottish Tories gather in Troon this weekend for their annual conference. It must be time for another of WingsLand’s super-popular Unionist photo-galleries, then!

Warning: contains scenes of an adult nature. Quite some way beyond “adult”, in fact.

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We've written before about the democratisation of criticism, and how it's all but obliterated genuine videogames journalism. Here's what the phenomenon has brought us, in the shape of some reviews of Angry Birds Space, which was released today.

Click to enlarge if you can't read them. (NB Unlike Amazon, you do actually have to buy/download a game on iTunes before you can review it.)

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If you're finding all the polarised ideological debate about the Budget tax changes a bit hard to follow, Wings over Scotland is here to help. Simply put, what the Chancellor is apparently expecting us all to believe is essentially this:

"Dear Rich McWealthy,

We note that last year you had £40,000 of higher-rate taxable income. Well done you! We asked you to pay tax on that amount at 50% – sending you an invoice for £20,000 – but you employed a clever accountant (who you paid £1000) in order to reduce your tax bill to just £6,000.

This year, however, we see that you again have £40,000 of higher-rate taxable income. As we do not wish to see you flee the country and thereby damage the prospects of economic growth and wealth creation, we have decided to reduce the upper tax rate to 45%, so you'll only have to pay us £18,000 rather than the £20,000 we (with hindsight quite unreasonably) demanded last year.

We are sure that in the light of this new lower rate, you will be happy to send the Treasury a cheque for £18,000 rather than the £6,000 you paid last year, and that since the new rate is so much more agreeable you won't feel the need to procure the services of the clever accountant again (even though he'd still be saving you a whopping £11,000).

Thanks very much in advance for the extra money! We'll be spending it on keeping your local library open, so that all the OAPs and disabled people who can't afford their fuel bills any more will have somewhere to sleep next winter.

Love,
HMRC"

If you're swallowing that one, please get in touch immediately. We have an investment opportunity you're going to be keen to get involved with.

For the thousands of readers who slightly startlingly visited yesterday's piece on Bath's retail economy (you never know which are going to be the popular stories in this business), here's the December 2009 WoS feature on Newport referenced in it, which I've unlocked from the WoS subscriber section. (I tried to just copy it over into this blog, but it was a hideous technical nightmare.)

How To Commit A Terrorist Atrocity And Get Away With It

If I can find the time one day next week, I'm going to try to go back to Newport and see how it's getting along two years on. Stand by for upbeat feelgood action!

Ed Miliband's speech to the Scottish Labour conference, 2nd March 2012:

"If we believe in the idea of Scotland as a progressive beacon, why would we turn our back on the redistributive union – the United Kingdom?"

John McFall, Baron of Alcluith, Scottish Labour MP until 2010 and ex-chairman of the House Of Commons Treasury Committee, on BBC News at 8.46am, 21st March 2012:

"The North-South divide is getting bigger, not smaller."

When Labour ask you to vote for the status quo of the "redistributive Union" in 2014, readers, remember which direction it is that the party – by its own admission – wants to keep redistributing the UK's money in.

And so tick follows tock. Alert WoS viewers may recall a subscriber feature from way back in December 2009 in which we chronicled the grim retail decay of the Welsh city of Newport. But two years into the Tories' medieval bloodletting "cure" for Britain's financial woes, the evidence of the country's slow but inexorable economic collapse can no longer be contained in the ghettoes of the working class. Because this is Bath.

This compact city of just 80,000 or so is swelled all year round by swarming hordes of well-heeled tourists (because you have to be well-heeled to come here at all) who troop in in their literally-millions to admire the pretty architecture and spew money into a local economy that's already cherry-pink with high-earning professionals.

I've lived here, lurking unnoticed in one of Britain's wealthiest corners, for over 21 years now. In all that time, it's hard to think back and recall even a single instance of a city-centre shop that's been empty for anything other than a brief transitional period between owners. Not any more.

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