Wings Over Scotland

Kezia Dugdale in yesterday’s Daily Record on the subject of Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can’t pin our hopes on a leadership who speak only to the converted, rather than speaking to the country as a whole.

I don’t think Jeremy can unite our party and lead us into government. He cannot appeal to a broad enough section of voters to win an election.”

So let’s be absolutely clear: if Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election next month, as almost everyone expects him to, the UK (and therefore Scotland) is doomed to Conservative rule until at least 2025.

That’s not our view, but the official public position of the leader of Scottish Labour.

Should there be a second independence referendum in the next few years, Scotland’s choice will be a clear one: a generation of brutal Tory austerity, isolated from Europe (losing out on billions of pounds in funding) and the protections of the Human Rights Act, or taking responsibility for ourselves.

And every time Kezia Dugdale or her Labour colleagues in Better Together 2.0 protest that there’s another option she’ll be contradicted not by angry nationalists, but by her own words. So we’re sure everyone on all sides of the debate in Scotland will be watching the outcome of the leadership contest with interest. There’s a lot at stake.

For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.

The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.

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Here’s the BBC reporting Kezia Dugdale’s speech at the opening session of the new Scottish Parliament, less than three months ago:

It seems the Scottish Labour leader’s had a change of heart since then.

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Annie Wells and Brian Whittle are two new Conservative MSPs. Look how happy and excited they are today at Labour winning a council by-election from the SNP.

The SNP candidate actually won comfortably on first-preference votes, but was edged out at the sixth count under the Single Transferable Vote system when 78% of Tory voters gave their second preference to Labour (whose own vote fell 7%).

We’re trying to think of a good reason why they’re still two separate parties, but to be honest with you, readers, we’re coming up short.

No, we’re not referring to the Spectator’s awful reheated whine from super-Unionist composer Sir James Macmillan, Knight Commander Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire, in which he takes the audacious step of accusing some OTHER artistes of cravenly kowtowing to the establishment.

(A complaint he’s been levelling for several years in any publication that’ll listen, and which today’s piece hasn’t bothered to update with any post-2014 examples.)

We’re actually talking about this:

Because this one’s even older.

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There’s a story in today’s Herald about yet another SNP disaster:

Backfires? What, the fares have gone UP?

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An alert reader spotted this today:

How times have changed, eh, readers?

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God knows, readers, there’s almost nothing we want to write about less than either David Torrance or the Scottish Six. Just to restate our own position for the record, we couldn’t care less either way about a dedicated teatime Scottish news programme on BBC Scotland – not because it’s a bad idea but because we have no confidence that in reality it’d end up any better than the embarrassment that is Reporting Scotland, far and away the regional station’s worst current-affairs broadcast.

(Certainly now that Scotland 2016’s had the chop.)

Nevertheless, the former’s article about the latter in today’s Herald is one of the most abysmally disingenuous and badly-argued things we’ve seen in the Scottish media for quite some time, and in the absence of any more diverting news in what now seems to have reasserted itself as the traditional summer slow season, we might as well take a methodical look at it.

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Straight from a Scottish Labour activist, here’s a little something that’s worth keeping in mind every day of the next decade (or more) of brutal Tory governments imposing policies rejected by the vast majority of Scots.

Have you ever wondered how you try to poison and shut down a debate and a political environment that you fear you’ve found yourself on the losing side of, readers? Well, it’s funny you should ask, because as it happens we’ve got a visiting professor – an expert authority on the subject – with us today to give us a demonstration.

Make sure you’ve got your pens and notepads ready. He’s got a very busy schedule and we can’t afford to have him here for long.

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The mad explosion of news that consumed most of July has largely abated. The Tories have a new leader, Labour are settling in for an insanely destructive and bitter two-month factional war in order to (almost certainly) re-elect the same one they only elected 10 months ago, and Brexit is on hold until next year.

So with a palpable sigh of relief, the Scottish political media has been able to get back to what it does best: juvenile silly-season drivel about nothing.

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In December 2013, the editor of this site – who knew nothing of the secret this article is about to reveal – tweeted “When we write the chronicles of independence, I hope there’ll be a whole chapter on @A_DarlingMP”.

Well, this is as close as we’re going to get.

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