When crying wolf is the fault of the wolf

The SNP is bad. It’s very bad, terribly bad, badly bad. Scarcely a day goes by without the Unionist media telling Scotland just how badly bad bad the bad SNP is. Everything about them is bad, everything the Scottish government does is bad. Scotland is full of stupid cultists who insist on supporting the SNP out of badness, because they’re bad, and stupid, and culty. And it’s all the fault of the SNP for being bad, and controlling the populace with bad mind control rays and neurolinguistic programming that penetrates the thickest tin foil hat fashioned from a handy cut out and keep guide in a Jenny Hjul column in the Scotsman.

On Saturday we had peak SNPbad. Magnus Gardham of the Herald wrote an article complaining that saying SNPbad was bad, that it has become a means for the SNP to dodge all criticism. Only he neglected to mention why SNPbad ever became a meme in the first place. That would mean he’d have to look at his own behaviour and that of his Unionist media chums, and that would never do. It’s only cybernats who merit criticism, when you criticise anyone else it’s bullying and abuse.

With a media which is, with the exception of one Sunday and one daily newspaper, entirely Unionist, the message that the bad SNP is bad bad dominates the press agenda. SNPBad is the agenda, and the only agenda, because the only press outlets which aren’t Unionist are of course badly bad, and cultishly tin foil hattish too. They’re not at all like the worldly wise Unionists. Not like the Unionists with their outward looking tolerance and lack of bias and willingness to see all sides of an argument, oh no. It’s that unbiased neutrality that allows them to publish stories about how terrible it is that the Forth Bridge was closed even though the Unionist parties were the ones opposing a new bridge, about how Scotland’s NHS is so rubbish even though it’s better than England’s, and about how it’s scandalous that Nicola Sturgeon has a posh coffee making machine. And on and on and on in an unending torrent of stale mince based crapulosity.

When you live next door to a sewage plant, your nose eventually gives up and no longer smells the crap. You can walk out into your garden and the only odour you’ll detect is the sweet smell of the flower on a thistle. That’s what’s happened in Scotland with our Unionist media and their constant deluge of SNPcrap. We no longer smell it. We’ve given up caring. Scotland no longer pays any heed to those who fancy themselves as opinion makers, because what ordinary Scots learned during the independence referendum was that we are perfectly capable of forming our own opinions and we need the opinion formers of the Unionist press like we need bog roll made from sandpaper.

The three ply sandpaper isn’t best pleased by the discovery that it’s being left on the shelf by the news shoppers. It clearly isn’t the fault of their product, which comes with the seal of approval of the British establishment. Purveyors of sandpaper based lavatorial cleansing products get awarded knighthoods and OBEs and are granted interviews with really important politicians – you know, the ones who don’t live in Scotland. This is clearly a testament to the utility and product worthiness of an arse scraped raw. So the fact that this award winning product is being rejected by the punters can only be because they have been seduced by an alien cult which tells them stupid idiocies like they can wipe their behinds with something soft. The very idea.

The Unionist media doesn’t understand why its message has lost traction and continues to lose traction. It prefers to console itself with the familiar nostrums that it’s all because the SNP is bad. This makes the Scottish Unionist media the only media on the planet which reports the story of the boy who cried wolf as being all the fault of the wolf.

When it’s not the fault of the SNP bad wolf, it’s the fault of the evil cybernat. It’s the fault of everyone but the Unionist media. The Unionist media is professional, they fancy that they are able to distinguish between the BMW of the Scotsman and the rickety bicycle of a cybernat blog. It’s just a shame for them then that when the professionals of the Scottish Unionist media see a shiny powerful motor, the rest of us see a canoe up shit creek without a paddle. The only direction it’s headed in is downwards as fewer and fewer of us buy newspapers, as fewer read their commentary, as trust in them is flushed away like the only use left for the Daily Record.

The term cybernat is Unionist shorthand for anyone who supports independence and who has access to the Internet. It’s a term which attempts to diminish, discredit and disgrace ordinary Scots who are interested in politics, the very people who would in the normal course of events be most interested in reading the opinions of a columnist in a newspaper who writes about politics. The very people who are most likely to read a newspaper column by the likes of Magnus Gardham. Every time they use the term, they’re destroying their own career. Now what was once the strength of the Unionist media has become its weakness.

Scotland deserves better. Scotland deserves a media that actually reflects the breadth and variety of opinions in this country. We deserve more than a constant litany of SNPbad and independence mad. The half of this country that supports independence demands that our views and opinions are treated with the same respect that the Unionist media demands for itself. For too long the Unionist parties and their followers in the media have had it all their own way, for too long they’ve been able to ignore and marginalise the voices that say – things don’t have to be this way, things can be different, things can be better.

They can’t do that any more, there are too many of us. Our voices are too numerous to be silent, our tongues will not be held. It’s going to be a very happy new year. Just not for the Unionist establishment.

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