Even when you’re retired, some things are too journalistically offensive to let pass, such as this piece of absolute garbage we just saw from The National today.
The paper’s anonymous reporter set off all our red warning lights at once.
The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:
So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:
That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.
We just watched a nine-minute segment on Sky News, purportedly on the subject of “Is the Union between Scotland and England under threat?”, which for maximum balance and impartiality included views from both Labour and the Tories – in the forms of Paul Sweeney MP and John Lamont MP – but nobody else.
Both men spouted some quite extraordinary claims, all of which went unchallenged by presenter Adam Boulton. Let’s just take a quick look at a couple of the best ones.
Wait, what?
Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.
A little snippet in today’s Times caught our eye earlier.
As alert readers may recall from our numerous investigations into the enduring enigma that is Scottish Labour’s membership figures, at the end of 2014 the branch office was claiming to have either 14,000 or 20,000 members.
And even in a world where 38% is “almost half” and five is half of seven, there’s still no way you can get 21,000 to be “almost double” either 14,000 or 20,000.
Were Labour lying in 2014, or are they lying now, or (and this is our guess) were they lying both times and their real membership is nothing like any of those unverified, unscrutinised, plucked-from-the-air numbers?
We’ll probably never know, and it’ll almost certainly never matter.
In this site’s view, the proposed new employee-parking levy which the 2019 budget will enable local authorities to implement if they choose to – but which is in no sense being imposed on anyone by the SNP, who don’t have a majority on a single Scottish council – is a pretty rotten idea, which will do nothing to combat climate change or congestion and will punish ordinary workers purely to make Greens feel important, but that’s neither here nor there. Councils can answer to voters if they use it.
What we’re a lot more worried about is the rampant Zimbabwe-style hyper-inflation that’s apparently running wild across Scotland, at least if you listen to Olympic-grade imbecile Jamie Greene MSP.
That was at 10.18 yesterday morning. But by halfway through lunchtime the situation had become far more serious.
Q: Why did Scottish Labour refuse to propose a costed alternative budget yesterday?
If we were to write an article every time Murdo Fraser said something moronic, we’d have to rename this site Wings Over Murdo Fraser, and drink an awful lot of Red Bull to be able to cover it all.
Stuff like this, for example, is almost too easy.
43% (actually 45.3% excluding Don’t Knows) is considerably more than Murdo Fraser has ever achieved in an election, either himself or as part of a party. His average over the seven elections he’s contested and lost since 1999 is just 30.1%, and until a blip in 2016 it had been falling lower and lower each time, as people have watched how he performed as an MSP and got less and less keen on the idea.
That’s still actually slightly more than the 28.6% his party secured in Scotland at the last election, though, in what was nevertheless generally regarded as an unusually impressive performance. Two years earlier they gathered just 14.9% of the votes cast.
Yet neither Fraser nor the Tories disappear for a generation every time Scotland tells them to go and get stuffed. Fraser keeps trousering an MSP’s fat salary despite two decades of unbroken and unequivocal personal rejection from the electorate, even as he demands that the independence movement gives up after losing ONE vote.
But in his defence, his leader’s not setting him much of an example.
From today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday:
Blimey, a “hammering”? Well, we suppose after 14 years in power they’ll have had a good run, so who’s going to replace them as the next Scottish Government?
So we stumbled, we thought, across a random Twitter idiot this morning.
Alert readers may have spotted a flaw or two in that claim.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
