Wings Over Scotland

Vince Cable, who was once apparently some sort of politician, took it upon himself to issue an opinion yesterday on the subject of referendums that had independence supporters on social media hooting with mocking laughter long into the night.

The estimable Wee Ginger Dug has already dealt adroitly with just the 300 or so most obviously ridiculous aspects of Cable’s tone-deaf and spectacularly hypocritical view, so we won’t step on his paws by repeating them here.

Instead we thought we’d do what we do best, and check the facts.

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GERS Week is always a good time to catch Unionists saying mad stuff. But in the midst of a rant last night about (genuinely) how countries aren’t best running their own affairs but having other countries do it for them, the former “Better Together” chief, recent spectacularly failed Labour candidate and current [NOBODY KNOWS] Blair McDougall came out with a real peach.

We’re sure that the USA, Russia and China (to name but three off the top of our heads) will be startled and dismayed to learn that they’re no longer “serious” nations. But possibly not quite as surprised as the government of Denmark will be to learn that they’re in a monetary union with France.

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This Wings story from April about a wildly untrue Scottish Daily Mail front-page splash has been entirely vindicated by a correction in the paper today, conceding both of the key complaints we made in our piece.

The Mail has, as you’d imagine, printed the correction rather smaller than the original story, so we thought we’d blow it up a little here for easier reading.

Because we’re sure they wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.

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We’re having a lot of trouble with this one, to be honest.

The Record, along with Scottish Labour and a lot of the left of social media, are up in arms that a mystery benefactor has donated a £230,000 Rolls Royce to Glasgow City Council for the use of the Lord Provost. But nobody can quite manage to explain why they’re so angry about it.

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So it appears that Ruth Davidson has been lying again.

And as is so often the case, the lie is easy to expose.

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So it seems our article of earlier today rattled the Herald’s cage but good. Scottish political Twitter has been an absolute logjam of incandescent Herald Group hacks all afternoon, making all manner of wild accusations and threats. At the head of the fury, of course, was Chief Reporter And Witchfinder General Mr David Leask.

Unfamiliar with the Scottish media? God, how we wish THAT was true.

Leask issued a long (long) stream of invective on Twitter, while hiding behind a block that means we can’t post any responses to it that any of his Twitter followers will see. So for the record, we suppose we’ll have to address them here.

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This one won’t take long. This is the front page lead on today’s Herald:

It’s a trope beloved of Unionists (and was a particular favourite of the paper’s departed columnist David Torrance) – how dare Scotland imagine that it’s special? – and the Herald bangs the drum extra-hard this morning, with Anas Sarwar given lots of room to talk Scotland down while insisting that he’s not talking Scotland down, claiming that the idea of Scotland being “less intolerant than our neighbours” is a myth.

So let’s just check the facts.

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The front page of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

The problem: it’s completely and utterly made up.

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Alert readers may recall some articles last August in which we highlighted the total pig’s breakfast Scotland’s media had made of reporting ScotRail punctuality figures, centred around mistaking the “on time” figures (trains arriving within 59 seconds of their scheduled time, ie at the advertised minute) for the “PPM” figures (trains arriving within five minutes) which are the basis of official punctuality targets.

Several newspapers, including the Herald, Courier, Daily Record and Daily Mail, had to publish corrections after our articles, so we can be pretty sure they won’t have made that mistake again with the latest stats.

Can’t we?

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December:

January:

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We thought it might be worth going through this in a bit more detail.

The phrase “out of control” is in quote marks in the Herald’s front-page headline, leading readers to believe someone has said it, but who? Let’s investigate.

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Remarkably, the notoriously unreliable and yet somehow omnipresent Scottish political commentator and reality-disputer David “Davey” Torrance was still digging last night in the wake of this story from three days ago.

Never, eh? Let’s see if that’s true, shall we?

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