Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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The former Chancellor of the Exchequer in today’s Press & Journal:

55-45 is “far more decisive” than 62-38? We think we’re finally beginning to understand why the last Labour government left the British economy in such a mess.

Because the party is still stuffed with braindead cockroaches like this:

People of North Ayrshire, you’ve got a real prize there. Well done you.

The next Scottish council elections are in May next year.

This is the demented, McCarthyite state of madness the Labour Party has reached:

This is a party now openly rejecting anyone as a member who has ever supported any other party. We’d take a minute to try to explain to them how the arithmetic of that one works out, but they’re a long, long way beyond the grasp of reason now.

This can’t be a good sign.

One thing you can always guarantee on GERS Day is that the latest set of figures for Scotland’s devolved economy inside the UK will trigger another uncontrolled spurt of “SNP HONEYMOON OVER” articles from the nation’s dogged commentariat.

Today we’ve seen already examples (links below) from two ex-Scotsman editors, Iain Martin and Magnus Linklater, the latter popping up in the Times by way of a rather crass and unpleasant analogy involving Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts.

And since we’d rather watch “Suicide Squad” again than spend any more time going over the arguments about GERS (and trust us, readers, we don’t say that lightly), we thought it’d be more fun if we finally got round to compiling a semi-definitive list of all the times the collective wisdom of Scotland’s media and opposition has confidently predicted the SNP’s imminent demise.

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This morning’s SNP BAD piece in the Herald has undergone a slight change in tone since we wrote about it.

We’ll just assume that a small pang of conscience overcame someone.

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A parable of internet abuse. Acknowledgements to Alan Moore and Frankie Boyle.

Dedicated to David Torrance, Susan Calman, Johanna Baxter and Angela Eagle.

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