Wings Over Scotland

It was good to see our old pal, prolific Labour and “Better Together” activist Duncan Hothersall, welcoming the chance for everyone to learn from mistakes yesterday with regard to giving out people’s personal information on the internet.

Of course, Roseanna Cunningham only revealed contact info that was already in the public domain and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, and which had been widely sent out by the person concerned in a spray of unsolicited begging letters. It’d be much worse to give out contact information that was previously unknown and was only sent to one person in a private email, right?

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We take our hats off to the No campaigners who braved a cold, dark Scottish morning to go and hand out leaflets to the public at train stations across the country today.

We’d have preferred it if they were distributing leaflets that weren’t packed with a litany of flat-out lies, of course, but we suppose you can’t have everything.

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Jim Murphy in the Daily Mail last week on the appalling “cybernats”:

“It’s time for the SNP and the First Minister to finally rein these people in. Washing their hands of them and pretending they don’t know who they are will no longer do.”

And this is a Labour spokesman in 2012 when a user of a Labour Facebook page had wished death on Alex Salmond’s 90-year-old father:

“This desperate smear campaign falls at the first hurdle because this Facebook page is not owned, managed, or operated by Scottish Labour, and it will not detract from the rantings and ravings of SNP candidates – sacked or otherwise – online.

Political parties are responsible for their candidates and officials, but members of the public must be responsible for their own behaviour.”

So, as far as we can follow: it’s nothing to do with Labour if its supporters – in a Facebook group subscribed to by all the party’s most prominent Scottish MPs, MSPs and activists – wish for Alex Salmond’s dad to die, but as soon as some random nat calls Jim Murphy a “w*****” (whatever one of those is), it’s no longer a private matter and the SNP and First Minister must take direct personal responsibility and action?

Have we got that about right?

…not to laugh. The Scottish Daily Mail, unperturbed by the waves of mockery, is still banging away furiously on the “cybernats!” drum today, with another front-page lead and another two-page spread inside.

The paper’s managed to rope gormless Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale into its one-sided witch-hunt, and she pens an article dramatically entitled “TWITTER AND A THREAT TO BAYONET ME” complaining of someone “recently” threatening her, although the offensive tweet in question turns out (not revealed in the piece) to be 15 months old.

The above picture is – really and truly – the story’s illustration.

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Tell you what, readers – say what you like about the Daily Mail, but you certainly can’t accuse them of not really going for it once they get an idea into their heads.

These are all just from the last week or so, and there’s more to come. The paper has been going around doorstepping random pro-independence tweeters for what we presume is going to be quite a sizeable feature any day now (we declined their offer to send a hack and photographer round, but answered a few questions by email, as much for the sheer curiosity of seeing how they’d twist them as anything else).

And the “Cybernat Watch” column is now our favourite start to the day.

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Step 1: Write an offensive, provocative piece of trollbait for the Daily Mail, describing your opponents as “kilted bum-barers who bellow ‘freedom’ whenever an English person hoves into view” and suggesting that a Yes vote is an abdication of morality.

(If you can then somehow get the Guardian to reprint it, bonus!)

Step 2: Whine like a baby when you get the response you wanted all along.

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…they say, is timing. Alert readers may have noticed that Scottish Labour have spent all day on a cheap smear attempt against SNP Cowdenbeath by-election candidate Natalie McGarry, based on a couple of personal Twitter comments she made two years ago that were mildly critical of teachers, and which Labour had evidently rather creepily kept on file for all that time just in case she was ever selected to fight a seat.

“How DARE she attack our heroic, flawless and infinitely mighty educators?” had been the line since early this morning, issued alongside the uncompromisingly righteous hashtag #ContemptForTeachers. (Although all Ms McGarry had actually said was that teachers do a good job but liked to moan a bit, which isn’t terribly contemptuous.)

So there was a certain inevitability that the hapless, bumbling D-listers of Labour’s northern branch office would be swiftly humiliated by their UK masters yet again.

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We were a little bemused to read in today’s Herald (and also to hear on “Good Morning Scotland”) of the appointment of Professor Jim Gallagher as an official adviser to “Better Together”. Not because we’d been in any doubt about the academic’s views on independence, but because the Herald had already identified Prof. Gallagher as the No campaign’s “Director of Research” in a referendum supplement back in December.

Indeed, the Herald article goes on to note that “Mr Gallagher has been working behind the scenes for Better Together for several months”. So today seems a pertinent moment to revisit a letter we sent after reading the supplement to Ian Stewart, the editor of The Scotsman, and to which we’re still awaiting a response.

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“Better Together” website, May 2013:

“In 500 days Scots will answer the most important question we have ever been asked. On all the big questions – on currency, on the EU, on pensions – the nationalists have shown they don’t have the answers to the questions that we and people all over Scotland are asking. 

Today we ask over 500 more questions. This list is by no means exhaustive – instead, it aims to demonstrate the range of different questions that still need answered. Many more questions already exist and as more of the big issues are debated more and more questions will arise. That’s why we will continue to ask the difficult questions.

It’s time we got some answers.”

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Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

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There’s pretty much nothing about Labour’s latest fearmongering anti-independence leaflet (revealed exclusively by us on Tuesday night) that doesn’t make us facepalm.

The only difficult thing is deciding which aspect is the most idiotic.

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There is no technical fault. This is really happening.

Anas Sarwar, there, raging about people not voting to abolish the bedroom tax.

Yes, THAT Anas Sarwar.

Don’t pinch yourself. You’re not dreaming. He’s actually doing it.  Go and see.