There’s an extraordinary article in the Daily Record today. Here’s a bit of it:
Alert readers might feel that a few lines have gone missing somewhere between paragraphs four and five. And the fact that they have has nothing to do with dead football clubs, and everything to do with the dying Scottish media.
Today’s Herald reveals that the new Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Frank McAveety (who was last seen in the headlines leering at a 15-year-old girl visiting the Scottish Parliament), has hired Bob Wylie as a special adviser.
Wylie was communications director of the scandal-riddled Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), which readers may recall from last year’s banning of an advertising campaign for this site on the city’s Underground after receiving one complaint about it.
But he’s somewhat more famous for his part in an expenses junket which saw several of the quango’s senior management bill taxpayers for a 2008 “fact-finding” mission to Manchester whose timing just happened to coincide with the UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg being played in the same city.
Wylie’s appointment follows the controversy which arose when Labour gave convicted drunken arsonist Mike Watson a job as education spokesman in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. And the two hirings threw some light on a thought we’d been thinking since reading a Kevin McKenna column in last weekend’s Observer.
Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:
The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.
Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.
(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)
A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.
There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.
The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.
Many pundits are of the opinion that the new Tory Max government will be actively hostile to the BBC, which the party has long believed is an expensive public-sector hotbed of right-on lefties. So when we did our latest poll, it seemed worth finding out how much the people of Scotland valued the state broadcaster.
There were, let’s say, some interesting quirks.
The reasons for Scottish Labour’s obliteration at the hands of the electorate last week are manifold, and most of them were very thoroughly explored in the weekend’s press, for example by Kevin McKenna here and here.
But as is our wont here on Wings, we wanted something a little more empirical to get our teeth into, so a few days before the election we commissioned a poll of 1,013 Scottish voters from Panelbase covering some of the subjects the regional office had campaigned on under its branch manager Jim Murphy.
The results were fascinating.
There’s been considerable mirth in nationalist circles ever since Jim Murphy became leader of the Scottish Labour branch office late last year. Announcing that he wanted to “reach out” to Yes voters, his idea of an olive branch was to hire three of the most divisive and obnoxious figures to be found anywhere in his party’s entire hinterland, in a move about as conciliatory and unifying as when Rangers signed Mo Johnston.
Counter-intuitively, the link-up with Blair McDougall (who headed Murphy’s successful leadership bid) is the one that makes the most sense. After all, as “Better Together” campaign director McDougall was responsible for turning a 30-point lead for No into a 10-point one, so he clearly knows something about how to appeal to Yes people.
But for a man widely cited as smart and savvy, Murphy also staffing his office with comically unpleasant Twitter troll John McTernan and the nutter-fringe imbecile Susan Dalgety – someone who was last seen resigning in disgrace after likening the SNP to the Omagh bombers – was harder to understand.
And the non-stop trainwreck that has followed leaves only one explanation.
It looks very much as though Scottish Labour are pinning their hopes of recovery on “Glasgow Man”, and they’ve plainly decided he’s an Old Firm fan.
Today’s press release in the Scotsman – which oddly relegates Jim Murphy to second billing halfway down the page – goes under the unlikely headline of “Miliband will keep Scotland games on terrestial [sic] TV”, and claims that the Scottish national football team’s tournament qualifiers will be added to the “crown jewels” list of games which are only allowed to be shown on free-to-air terrestrial TV, not satellite pay channels.
But readers might be wise to be sceptical.
It’s the start of the week and it’s cold, so we won’t make it too tricky.
Which of the newspaper stories below is the odd one out, readers?
We’re technically on holiday today, folks, so for the first time in a very long time we’re going to write something about football and if you don’t like it that’s just your tough luck. Nobody’s making you click the “Read more” button.
Two fairly remarkable things happened in Scottish football today. The first was that Aberdeen went top of the Premiership for the first time in about 20 years, but the second was of a bit more relevance to this site’s political and media-monitoring brief.
That’s because, for the very first time that we’re aware of since Rangers went bust in 2012, the chief executive of the Scottish league’s governing body, Neil Doncaster, explicitly and directly stated that the club currently 15 points adrift of Hearts in the game’s second tier was the same one that died two and a half years ago.
And that matters more than you think it does.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
