Just so we’re absolutely clear on what happened today:
There’s been a U-turn (The Sun):
Except that nothing has changed (the Scottish Lib Dems):
Let’s see if we can get a rhythm going.
Today’s Daily Record has a swipe at Jeremy Corbyn for, well, let’s call them “mixed messages” over a second independence referendum. It suggests his Scottish branch manager Kezia Dugdale would have “her head in her hands” over his latest comments, which is a bit rich considering Dugdale’s own history on the subject.
And since her headline boast when she took over as leader of the North British office was that people would know exactly what Labour stood for (and indeed she spent all of the weekend’s keynote Sunday Politics interview listing all the things she’d been very very clear about), we thought we’d have a recap and see how that was going.
Politics is still on hiatus after the dreadful events of Manchester, so we’ve taken the chance to go and enjoy the sudden summer weather while nothing was happening.
And today, as we (“Drove at a legal speed” – Ed) across the pretty hills overlooking Bath in an inexpensive convertible, a song came on the stereo that made us think of all the Unionist trolls who were still busily raging on Twitter – mainly about the SNP’s awful failure to light up every building in Scotland with the Union Jack in tribute to the dead (no, really), but also at the most recent data “proving” that independence would mean the country regressing to the Stone Age and whatnot.
So we thought we’d share it with you, because as well as having a jaunty tune it’s got a good attitude to adopt when they’re screaming and yelling themselves red, white and blue in the face about something or other, rather than wasting your time and mental equilibrium on being dragged into their fetid mind-swamp.
It works on any day, even if you’re not in a sports car.
So the French presidential election result is in. And we’re getting early reactions:
Well, those are a bit weird, aren’t they?
When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.
So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?
An alert reader received a letter today about the forthcoming general election, from Scottish Labour’s only current MP, Ian Murray. (Although you’d have to know that in advance, as he doesn’t mention the Labour Party in it once.)
Here’s a close-up of part of it:
And below, we swear, is what’s on the other side of the page.
Today the Scottish Parliament spent several hours heatedly debating a motion to call for a second Section 30 order to enable a new independence referendum (several more will follow tomorrow before the vote). We watched all of it so you didn’t have to, and are delighted to present you with a few clips that probably won’t make the news.
On such a momentous topic, this was the intervention that Scottish Labour list MSP Monica Lennon felt was the most pressing issue to raise, for example:
We’re very touched, obviously, and will add it to our file of other mentions in the chamber and elsewhere. But there were probably more important things to discuss.
Almost a year ago we ran a short piece mocking a Scotsman headline which claimed that “THOUSANDS” of people had signed a Tory anti-referendum petition, when the actual number was a strictly-accurate-but-pathetic TWO thousand.
We didn’t think that could ever be beaten for technically-true hyperbolic exaggeration, but we’d reckoned without the bold boundary-pushing ingenuity of the Daily Express.
Hundreds of thousands? How many hundreds, exactly?
Because when you really want people with their finger on the pulse of Scottish politics to analyse the implications of the Supreme Court decision on Brexit, where else would you go but to Channel 5’s The Wright Stuff, to hear from um, former rugby league star and haircut pioneer Martin Offiah?
You very rarely get useful stats about online newspaper readership, so we were quite intrigued by this snippet on tonight’s BBC2 Scotland documentary “Paper Thistle”, about the 200th anniversary of The Scotsman.
We don’t know what the numbers are or how brief the period was, but Wings’ average traffic is higher now than it was in 2014, while we suspect The Scotsman is moving in the opposite direction. For a single-issue website to be anywhere even in the same ballpark as a two-centuries-old broadsheet news brand with scores of full-time writers and production staff and a daily newsstand presence is a remarkable thing indeed.
We might start doing classifieds and sport just to see what happens.
The chap in the picture below, holding a placard with his name on it so that he doesn’t forget it, is Scottish Conservative MSP Jamie Greene.
He could probably do with writing a few other things on there too.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
