Wings Over Scotland

Sometimes it’s the smallest, most trivial things that give you away. Graham Grant is the Home Affairs Editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, and earlier this morning he tweeted this snarky dig at prominent independence supporter and pundit Pat Kane, also of the primarily-1980s band Hue And Cry:

Ostensibly it’s a throwaway gag aimed at puncturing an opponent’s pomposity and over-inflated self-regard while portraying the journalist as an arch, wise cynic.

But hold on a second.

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To the astonishment of all, it turns out that JK Rowling isn’t going to sue anyone after all. Or, as the ever-reliable-and-accurate Scottish Daily Mail puts it:

(It seems needlessly churlish and picky to also point out that McGarry currently isn’t an “SNP MP”, so we won’t do that.)

Instead, the author, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, intends to try to pressure McGarry into making a donation to her childrens’ charity, Lumos, which we can only presume is happy to receive money generated by what some people might regard as intimidation bordering on blackmail.

So that’s all well and good. If you’re going to bully people, after all, it’s probably best if it’s at least for a worthy cause. Rowling was full of praise for abusive Tweeter “Brian Spanner” when he raised some money for the same charity last year by selling t-shirts mocking the loony “Scottish Resistance” campaign group.

But not all charitable donations attract such gratitude.

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Social media amused itself briefly tonight over a spat between former SNP MP (now independent) Natalie McGarry and children’s author and hedge enthusiast JK Rowling.

It started like this:

And then some stuff happened.

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In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.

It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.

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As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.

In more senses than one.

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Over the last few days, as most of Scotland’s media has focused on hysterical smear stories and outright lies, we’ve been digging around trying to uncover the truth about events around and leading to the closure of the Forth Road Bridge.

Here’s what we’ve got so far.

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We’ve lost count of how many times we’ve drawn people’s attention to the necessity of sticking with newspaper articles right to the end if you don’t want to be horribly misled by eye-catching headlines. But it never hurts to have another example.

If you only read the start of today’s Scottish Mail On Sunday “bombshell” on the Forth Road Bridge (the left side of the picture above), you might come to a very alarming conclusion. But if you get all the way through it, to the paragraphs we’ve highlighted in red and enlarged on the right-hand side of the image, you’ll discover the truth.

Evidently the Daily Record actually IS capable of fixing dodgy stories:

We wonder why they still haven’t done it here.

On Wednesday the Daily Record ran this story:

It didn’t have to wait long for the “questions” to be answered.

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We were considering having a day off today, readers. There’s absolutely nothing of any note happening in Scottish politics, and the papers have been reduced to scraping up all manner of barely-reheated leftover dregs to fill their pages.

But then someone drew our attention to something in Scotland On Sunday about the ongoing Women For Independence fiasco, and we were too annoyed to let it lie.

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We saw this tweet from Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson yesterday:

And we were quite confused.

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When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.

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