I’ve been trying to follow some of the story regarding the 17 schools which have had to be closed in Edinburgh due to safety concerns, schools funded for an absolute fortune by previous Labour administrations using PFI (Private Finance Initiative), but you would be hard pressed to find any real stories with any detail. The Guardian cover the story with a headline photo of Nicola Sturgeon and only mention Labour at the very end of the short article in a quote by the Green Candidate. STV briefly cover the story with no mention of Labour or any quotes from Labour representatives, probably none were asked for. BBC online run with the story and no mention of Labour, how these schools are funded or any quotes from the Labour Party. The Herald cover the story, and guess what! No mention of Labour anywhere. I could go on and on and on but I won’t as it is being covered in Wings who will go into far more detail than I ever could I have no doubt.
We all know how morally corrupt the media in Scotland are, especially the BBC, but even I have been taken back by the absolute rubbing out of Labours part in this whole sorry saga on how these schools came to be and how they were funded. PFI will eventually cost upwards of 30 BILLION pounds in Scotland on buildings, hospitals etc that will not have cost even a quarter of that to build. For the media to effectively rub out Scottish Labours part in this, and to a lesser degree the Scottish Liberal Democrats who were in power with Labour at Holyrood when many of these projects were approved, is nothing short of a national scandal.
They often say that for a democracy to function it must have a free and unbiased media, well we have neither in Scotland. What we have in Scotland is a media collective the equivalent of Pravda, the former Soviet propaganda media arm. What we have in Scotland is an attack on our very democracy because for many who get their news from the mainstream the mainstream are feeding them lies, distortions or not just covering national scandals at all and even when they do they try to implicate Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP whenever they can. How much longer do we put up with this shit, the sooner these papers and the BBC die due to lack of sales and privatisation (unlikely for the BBC) the better because we are all being ill-served and fed shit every day.
No more, stop buying papers, stop watching the unionist news, seek out the truth on-line, go onto Wings Over Scotland, Munquins Republic, Craig Murray etc for the facts. Unionists need to wake up to the deception they are fed everyday, stop believing the shit they spout.
We all need to be amateur journalists now if the truth is to ever be heard.
grumpyscottishman.wordpress.com 
It seems, Bruce, that the media are more concerned, at this election time, with making sure that every story has an SNP bad theme.
Even stories that have nothing to do with the SNP.
Nicola certainly chaired an emergency meeting to decide what will be done in the short term, given that they had to close these schools, and that means teachers and pupils (at exam time) have nowhere to go. Apart from her opposition to these schemes back in the early days of parliament, that is her only involvement.
I wonder at broadsheets stooping so low, and having such a low opinion of their readers that they don;t credit them with knowing that the buildings all happened under Labour/Liberal administrations. No wonder their sales are in freefall. I noted that the Guardian/Observer site has a “contributions” button!
Two men and a cat and they call themselves newspapers.
Thanks for including me with the “greats”. A hardly deserved compliment 🙂
Tris
Your blog is excellent and the first one I read every day, it’s also the one I mostly tell people to read first. Wings is great and has the time and resources to be full time but it has been rubbished (wrongly) in the media so much that when you are trying to convince a no voter to look into things I often don’t refer to wings straight off as they just spout crap about the site a lot.
I listened to the raido this morning, a lot of round about mentions of the SNP but none of Labour, even the little bit I saw of Victoria Derbyshire (accident) there was no mention of Labour at all. You just give up with the media in this country, I think they want to die, to go down fighting for the empire no matter what it costs, but you would think people like the national union of journalists would at least have a view. It really is trying to tarnish the SNP by asociation by not mentioning the Scottish branch of Labour and the Scottish Liberal Demo hypo crats. I know blame won’t solve the sorry issue but the context is important, McConnell as good as forced local authorities down this road and it was fixed that the same large companies got the contracts all over Scotland. I wonder if Edinburgh Council can sue, I bet you they can’t, I bet there is a clause somewhere that doesn’t allow it.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and unlike the bridge there does need to be an investigation into this. Will wee Willie Rennie or Dugdull call for an investigation, of course they won’t, they have both been conspicuous by there absence all weekend, what a joke of branch offices. Where is the hateful jackie Baillie, Anus Sarwar etc. This countries unionist parties are a disgrace but the less media savy voters will believe it’s all the SNPs fault and they wonder why YES voters are not going away.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce
RevStu has made it clear that the wood pulp media have conspired to issue a Tory press release (even down to the typos!) which tries to blame the SNP government for the schools debacle because the Tories loony suggestion that HMI inspectors should have been responsible for checking buildings didn’t happen. WTF?!
Inspectors are teachers and education academics. They might notice (and have occasionally reported) that a school was already in visibly poor nick, but they are are not fecking structural engineers. Would you want a historian to be deciding you cancer diagnosis? That’s how loony the Tory slant is.
PFI was a Tory invention enthusiastically implemented by a Labour UK govt, a Lab/ Lib Scottish Executive and, in this case, a Labour council. The Scottish Labour Party, and especially Jack McConnell (a teacher, FFS!), and Gordon Brown, are deeply culpable.
I feel that the current Scottish government should be finding a way to hit back harder on this. Meet it head on. Demand to be interviewed on on radio and television, and make it widely known if this is refused. I don’t know why this isn’t happening. Is there something I am missing?
East Neuker :”I feel that the current Scottish government should be finding a way to hit back harder on this. Meet it head on. Demand to be interviewed on on radio and television, and make it widely known if this is refused. I don’t know why this isn’t happening. Is there something I am missing?”
I have railed about this to my local SNP MP several times. There are no straight answers it seems. Leading bloggers suggest that the SNP are worried they will “frighten the horses” ie potential converts to independence, if they take on the MSM, especially the BBC. It will be interesting to see how the SNP will “build a new case for independence” after the May election.
Brian,
If the SNP are following the strategy you describe, it is a very dangerous game. I am not a member and have no inside contacts, but as an independence supporter I can see the necessity to maintain a Holyrood majority for independence and that this realistically depends largely on the SNP, for whom I will be voting.
However, events like the Edinburgh school closures tend to be blamed on the government of the day (IE Holyrood) by many who don’t look past the headlines. The MSM conspiracy to conceal Labour’s culpability is working, and has to be challenged, on this and other issues.
If the SNP fail to get a Holyrood majority at this election, and that is not inconceivable, then the broader independence movement will have suffered a very serious setback.
Let those of us who may want to pursue policies in an independent Scotland which differ from he SNP’s priorities realise that we need to get independence first, because their our dreams will come to nothing, and indeed be crushed, in a UK taken out of the EU and run by the corrupt London centric right wing UK state.
I may well be preaching to the converted here, but we all need to redouble our efforts to get this across to others.
East Neuker
I think some inspectors already do that, my sons school got inspected and they commented on the state of building but only what they saw. Local councils should be checking this at the time they were built and the failure lies with whomever was project manager in Edimburgh (pun intended). The SNP can’t be blamed for Labour and Edimburgh Councils failure. The issue now is that every council will be required to check all the new builds and that will cost money, I hope the costs are passed on to those companies. Thankfully the system no longer happens in Scotland but it will be getting paid for forever. I think it’s maybe time to sit down with these companies and renegotiate the contracts or see if we can just give then what we feel they are worth, we were well and truly ripped off and the uniuonists are to blame for it, hense they have all fled to the hills and that media have been shocking although I detected on radio this morning a slight change but that word was still missing, Labour.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce
I had given up on the MSM but I thought I would take a little dip in the slurry of Reporting Scotland on Monday and Tuesday of this week and even I was shocked at the naked bias.
On Monday night Kez blamed the Tories, Tankie blamed the SNP and surprise surprise Wee Wullie did what Ruth told him and blamed the SNP.
On Tuesday John Smith’s lassie presented a ten minute PPB for Labour masquerading as a news item. I gave up after that. I’ve not been missing anything for the last few months. To be brutally honest they can shove their “news” up their arse.
I get all the information I need from excellent blogs such as this. Thank you.
lanark
I’m not religious about watching the news or buying papers as I was years ago, and like you I tend get most of my news from blogs and twitter etc via links but I still watch it occasionally (Scotnight,STV,QT,RS) just to see if they have improved and to remind myself what we are up against even though they do tend to piss me off. I buy The National once or twice a week, it’s bearable and not what I hoped it would be but at least some of it is worth a read. I rarely buy any of the Dundee papers, they are awful, every time I pick one up I am left gobsmacked at how bad they are and bias. Mainly it’s the blogs that I have links to and I do go onto Labour Uncut and Liberal Voice to keep an eye on them, sometimes there are some very good assessments of what is going on but mostly they are blind devotion like all the parties on their main sites. The PFI story has just been shameful in my opinion, it’s like they are trying to airbrush history, while throwing around blame doesn’t solve anything and I don’t blame Labour/Liberal/Tory for the shoddy schools, that’s the builders and the Councils lack of project management, I do blame them for the debt and the media for the lack of context to the story, it really has been shocking.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce