BBC NEWS: [abysmal, unprofessional disgrace to broadcasting]
ITV NEWS: Hold our beer!
(Still not deleted/fixed seven hours later.)
Wings Over Scotland has been monitoring the BBC’s coverage of Scottish politics for over 11 years now, readers, and other than The Nick Robinson Incident we’re honestly struggling to remember seeing anything worse than this.
The Corporation’s “coverage” of Ash Regan’s campaign launch for the SNP leadership election ran for roughly seven minutes. And we suppose we should be grateful that it did at one point feature a brief, incidental cameo appearance from Ash Regan.
This is beyond insane.
Like, obviously Rangers aren’t better than Celtic.
We read some harrowing tweets this week from an Edinburgh SNP activist. Sensitive readers should look away now, as the following article contains potentially triggering information about the wild and lawless streets of [checks notes] Corstorphine.
Steel yourselves, folks. Unsettling images follow.
We got up this morning intending to do a funny little piece about how Humza Yousaf’s attempt to fiddle an online poll on The National had spiralled into farce last night, with rival teams of bots spamming the poll with over 400,000 extra votes in 12 hours.
But then something a bit more significant happened.
Because a compulsory strike-off notice being filed in the First Gazette is a warning that a company is about to be dissolved.
Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
It’s remarkable how openly a certain faction of the SNP is now declaring surrender.
And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the events of the next few days and weeks will not just determine the future of the independence movement, but whether in any meaningful, practical sense it continues to exist at all.
The Indian Council of Scotland and the Muslim Council of the United Kingdom have this morning issued an extraordinary joint statement regarding their serious concerns about the SNP leadership contest. We reproduce it below at their request.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, December 2022:
And it was for Beth and for you guys that we were doing it, we were fighting it.”
Alex Cole-Hamilton, February 2023:
We wonder when Patrick Harvie, Ross Greer and Maggie Chapman will follow suit.
We’ve already noted how the Unionist press appears to be trying to influence the outcome of the SNP leadership election, but last night the big beast of Scottish media – the BBC – waded into the fray.
A major piece by the Corporation’s Scotland editor James Cook focused on interviews with two of the three contenders – excluding Ash Regan – on the basis that both had launched their official campaigns yesterday while Regan’s isn’t expected to be until later this week.
That’s fair enough. No problems there, right?
So this is interesting. Last week we were about to release some results from our latest Panelbase poll when events intervened. Naturally we’d asked a few questions about gender issues, and one of them concerned the Scottish Government’s potential legal challenge to the UK government’s use of a Section 35 order to block the Gender Recognition Reform bill.
There were three options in the question, and as luck would have it the three potential new leaders of the SNP each advocates a different one.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
