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Wings Over Scotland



The side of the thugs 129

Posted on May 04, 2015 by

Amazingly enough, the Scottish press today ISN’T wall-to-wall with stories about Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale, UK peer and lawmaker, endorsing the “f***ing booting” of Conservative supporters at the weekend, in a striking contrast to when a young SNP candidate said similar but less offensive things some months ago.

(Lord McConnell’s friends were talking in the future tense about something they would do. Mhairi Black was talking in the past tense, about things which she HADN’T done.)

sunjack

As far as we’ve seen, the small piece above in the Scottish Sun is the only coverage. (The Daily Record, as well as not reporting the McConnell comments at all, actually has another go at Mhairi Black instead.)

But we were having trouble recalling any “hate-filled violent mobs” (McConnell’s actual full quote) on the Yes/SNP side. And so was an alert reader who had a dig through the papers from the last couple of years.

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Something changed 126

Posted on May 02, 2015 by

Scottish Labour’s chief of staff in February:

mctbig1

The same man tonight:

mctr

Does the biggest party form the government or doesn’t it, John?

Your friends and neighbours 104

Posted on May 02, 2015 by

We know that politicians are allowed to lie in election literature, but we’re struggling to see how this isn’t fraud, which is something different altogether.

neighbours

Click the image to see both letters full-size.

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I think the Nazis are pretty good 236

Posted on April 27, 2015 by

If you’re trying to give someone an example of a terrible group of people from history, I think the Nazis are pretty good for that purpose. They fulfil the criterion excellently, what with all the invading and occupying and repression and genocidal murder and everything, and there’s very little ambiguity or any shades of grey about their evil.

nuremberg

Now, alert readers may have spotted that while the headline of this article is a genuine quote from the paragraph above, and could be technically correctly described as my words by someone with malicious and dishonest intent (something which does in fact happen regularly), it gives a highly misleading impression of what was really said.

And with that, welcome to the Scottish media.

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Telling good journalism from bad 245

Posted on April 05, 2015 by

As alert readers will already know, this site’s core long-term aim is to eventually render itself redundant, by showing people how to read between the lines, spot what isn’t being said and understand the various tricks that newspapers use in order to get the public to believe things that aren’t true without ever doing anything so crass (and more to the point, legally-actionable) as directly lying.

telleak

Today’s papers provide an especially clear-cut example.

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Leesten varry caurfelly 245

Posted on April 04, 2015 by

…we shall say zees only wance.

That clip (from just past midnight on the BBC News channel) isn’t a bad starting-point summary of last night’s extraordinary story, except by our count the Telegraph’s piece was fourth-hand rather than third-hand.

(First-hand would have been Nicola Sturgeon. Second-hand would have been the ambassador. Third-hand would have been the consul-general. The civil servant – who doubted the story him/herself – is fourth-hand.)

This is also a pretty good primer. Now let’s get to the fun stuff.

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Edging closer to the truth 143

Posted on March 30, 2015 by

Listeners to today’s “Good Morning Scotland” were treated (from 2h 7m at that link) to a consummate masterclass in the art of evasion from Labour’s Scottish branch-office manager Jim Murphy. The bulk of a 13-minute segment was devoted to Murphy’s claim that a Labour vote in this May’s general election would bring about an end to foodbanks in Scotland, although the pledge steadily degraded as interviewer Gary Robertson pressed fruitlessly for detail.

(Murphy refused to say if or when any money generated by a Labour UK government would be given to the Scottish Government, wouldn’t be drawn on when the need for foodbanks would be eradicated, shot down a straw man on benefit sanctions and eventually conceded that in fact there would always be foodbanks, by way of a brief diversion to “I do a lot of work for charity but I don’t like to talk about it”.)

garyrob

Towards the end, though, Robertson asked Murphy the question Scottish Labour really don’t want to answer, and this time he almost landed a knockout blow.

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Under pressure 145

Posted on March 22, 2015 by

We have to give Jim Murphy credit – on this week’s Sunday Politics he started off with the subtle, misleading but technically-accurate version of Labour’s line about the “biggest party forming the government”, which involves making the true but irrelevant observation that in the past it’s usually been the case. (Mainly because UK elections almost always give the biggest party a comfortable majority.)

But it only took a couple of minutes of questioning for the Scottish branch manager to lose his cool and resort to the comprehensively debunked flat-out lie again.

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We’ll get to the bottom of this yet 136

Posted on March 11, 2015 by

Is the Scottish NHS protected by devolution, or is it in mortal danger?

murphynhs

We’re expecting that answer any minute now, honestly.

Ten bad reasons 181

Posted on March 11, 2015 by

With apologies to Jason Donovan, we felt we should probably have a look at the latest election leaflet Scottish Labour are putting through people’s doors.

tenbad

We wouldn’t want voters to have too many broken hearts.

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2450 pixels of lies 172

Posted on March 04, 2015 by

The Daily Record is currently faithfully blaring out Labour’s anti-SNP “NHS in crisis” message, as part of the embattled party’s bizarre strategy of fighting a Westminster election solely on policies that are devolved to Holyrood, like health and education.

nhscrisis

But an article on its website today dredges new depths even for the Record.

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Underhand service 171

Posted on March 01, 2015 by

The categorical support of Andy Murray for Scottish independence, though only finally unambiguously revealed in today’s Sunday Times (the tennis star’s day-of-poll tweet backing Yes could by a strict semantic interpretation have been said to be somewhat equivocal), isn’t much of a surprise.

murrayyes

So it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the media told us.

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