Sky News earlier this morning:
Our ears always prick up when Kezia says she’s counted something herself.
We don’t want to fall into the trap of portraying the Liberal Democrats as a party of any political relevance or consequence in Scotland, but for the sheer comedy value alone Willie Rennie’s interview with Gary Robertson on today’s Good Morning Scotland is worth a couple of minutes of your time.
So, are we all clear?
We were very pleased to hear Gary Robertson challenge Kezia Dugdale on the curious matter of Scottish Labour’s membership and income figures on today’s Good Morning Scotland. Dugdale flapped and dodged and waffled for as long as she could before diverting the topic onto federalism, and eventually managed to wriggle away from the subject without any sort of proper answer (through no fault of Robertson’s).
But what she said just made the situation MORE confusing, not less.
Alert readers may recall as far back as July of last year, when we highlighted an odd thing that Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale had started saying.
Regardless of the fact that it was total hooey, Dugdale repeated it every chance she got, and the inevitable Scottish-media consequences have duly followed.
It might only be the 2nd of January, but it’s already pretty clear what we should expect from Scottish politics and the Scottish media in 2017.
Yesterday saw an absurdly petty response from Scottish Labour to the SNP’s “baby box” initiative, sourly carping at a dirt-cheap measure with a proven record of reducing infant mortality and providing vital help to the poor.
Today’s Herald, meanwhile, leads on a meaningless story about people being opposed to having a second independence referendum in 2017 – something nobody has proposed and which has no prospect of happening barring wildly unforseeable events.
But compared to the inside, that’s hard news.
Several papers today carry a desperate story about education that’s sourced straight from a Scottish Labour press release, which pulls some figures out of thin air without providing any sources and appears to have left out at least one significant factor.
But that’s not the funny bit.
Here’s Kezia Dugdale at FMQs today.
Just for fun, let’s do the sums again, shall we?
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.
Earlier today we were moved to tweet our scepticism regarding a claim made by the Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, as reported in the Guardian.
Even on the most casual glance, the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. If 62% of Scots voted to stay in the EU and 55% voted to stay in the UK, with no correlation between the two things, then the Venn-diagram intersection between those two groups seems pretty unlikely to add up to more than 50%, let alone a “vast” majority.
So as we like to do, we checked.
Over the past few days, readers, we haven’t been able to avoid noticing a recurring theme among Unionist types on social media – namely that the Holyrood election results are proof that support for independence is declining.
But it’s not until you ask them to explain that it gets completely mental.
Alert readers will have noticed that the Conservatives and most of the right-wing press have recently embarked on a hyperbolic campaign against the Scottish Government’s “named person” child-protection legislation. The latest assault is in today’s Daily Mail:
The shriekingly furious lead article thunders in outrage that “nearly two thirds of Scots have condemned the SNP’s state guardian scheme as an ‘unacceptable intrusion’ into family life”, which sounds like a pretty damning verdict.
It’s not until you look a little deeper that it all falls to pieces.
Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already eviscerated its comically inept bumbling in detail, but we thought we’d just quickly give you a visual version.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
