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Wings Over Scotland


The Queer Parliament 63

Posted on May 20, 2026 by

We were excited to discover this old footage of a very young John Swinney.

How thrilled he must be that he’s managed to make his dream come true.

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The Land Of No Laws 262

Posted on May 17, 2026 by

This game of football is not over.

Except for viewers in Scotland, where no laws apply.

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Steadying The Ship 78

Posted on May 15, 2026 by

Looks like this, apparently.

The Broken Rainbow 158

Posted on May 13, 2026 by

The image below is a graph illustrating how many seats each party won in last week’s supposedly “proportional” Scottish Parliament election, compared to how many they would have won if the electoral system had been actually proportional.

The SNP and Greens are now over-represented by 37% and 50% respectively, while the Unionist parties are all under-represented compared to their vote share by (left to right) 26%, 19%, 20% and 23%.

The Additional Member System has failed very badly at its job, from either perspective. “Pro-indy” parties have 73 seats (57%) rather than the 52 seats that their 40.8% vote share should have earned, while Unionist parties have 56 seats (or 43%) when they should have 69 for their 56% of the vote.

(The other 4% of the vote was scattered among 24 other parties or independents, with 1.8% going to identifiably pro-independence candidates, increasing the total “pro-indy” vote to 42.6%, fully 10 points short of current polling for independence itself.)

It is, therefore, a little bit of a stretch – to put it mildly – to present the refusal of the UK government to grant a second independence referendum on the basis of the results as an outrage against “democracy”. Indeed, if any outrage against democracy has taken place, it happened last Thursday.

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The Hills Of Far Away 136

Posted on May 12, 2026 by

Anyone seeking to make a compelling argument for the proposition that Scotland’s politicians and lawmakers are simply too farcically incompetent to ever be trusted with running an independent country had a gift-wrapped Godsend delivered to them last week by the idiot student children of Edinburgh.

But we can’t really put the blame on the colourfully-haired, keffiyeh-clad cretin kiddies of the capital for that, because it’s their elders and betters who opened the door.

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And Nothing Happened Forever 353

Posted on May 09, 2026 by

Well, we told you so. We told you in March (and indeed long before then) that the 2026 Holyrood election was a giant waste of time and money that would deliver exactly the same useless Parliament we already had, and so it proved.

The SNP ended up giving half-a-dozen seats to the Greens, Labour donated a handful to the Lib Dems, the Tories split into two parties with 29 seats instead of a single party with 31 and that’s about it. The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems stayed first, fourth and last, while the right-wing split let Labour creep from 3rd to joint 2nd despite losing seats.

A pro-indy tally of 72 became a pro-indy tally of 73, big whoop, and almost every SNP list vote elected Unionists instead, just as we told you for almost a year it would do.

We also told you that the only place there was even a chance of an SNP list seat was in the Highland region, where they did indeed sneak one at the very death of play, only because they’d somehow pulled off the incredible feat of losing Kate Forbes’ old seat of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch on a huge 21% swing, despite having started with a 15,000 majority in a seat where only 39,000 people voted.

So there we are.

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Pick Your Poison 208

Posted on May 07, 2026 by

At the end of last year we noted the unusual and persistent levels of divergence in Scottish political polling. As polls have become much more frequent during the election campaign, nothing about that has changed. The final polls, published yesterday, are so far apart from each other that they tell us basically zip.

Analysing this mess is meaningless, so we’ll just give you some highlights.

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The value bet 68

Posted on May 06, 2026 by

To pass the time on (praise be to Baby Jeebus) the last day of the Holyrood election campaign, we thought we’d do a catch-up summary of all the seat projections we could find from last month and this month. Here it is.

Now, as it happens we think the potential seat ranges are significantly wider. There are so many factors of uncertainty that while there’s no credible doubt who’s going to be the biggest party, we reckon SNP seats could potentially be anywhere from about 47 to 68 (most likely the upper part of that range), with corresponding ramifications below.

But there’s one potentially interesting thing in that bottom half.

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Anas Sarwar is a winner 32

Posted on May 06, 2026 by

Specifically, of the Single Most Toe-Curlingly, Face-Palmingly Cretinous Thing Said In The 2026 Holyrood Election Campaign, And Possibly Any Election Ever, Prize.

We mean, wow. We could easily write a 1000-word article purely on the top 10 things that are fatuously, obviously idiotic about those three short sentences, and so could you. So imagine how embarrassed the poor Daily Record must be today.

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Binfire Of The Vanities 181

Posted on May 04, 2026 by

For a nation that prides itself on hating the Tories, this is very odd.

And if you don’t see how, let us illustrate.

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Seven Days Too Long 315

Posted on April 30, 2026 by

It’s nearly over, readers. Just one more week of this to endure.

The most miserable Holyrood election campaign of all time will end next Thursday with an election which will deliver Scotland’s most miserable devolved government of all time. Only the exact form, colour and shape of the misery remains to be determined.

So as the SNP promise through forked tongues to cut the cost of living with a pledge they know full well they have no chance of being able to actually implement, while using the powers they DO have to INCREASE the cost of everything that makes life WORTH living, let’s look at exactly what flavour of dog vomit we can expect to be choking down along with our state-approved organic broccoli and fat-free gruel for the next half-decade.

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Push The Button 196

Posted on April 25, 2026 by

We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.

To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.

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    • sarah on The Queer Parliament: “Someone btl said that India doesn’t permit its citizens to stand in another country’s elections. Can we ask the Indian…May 20, 23:59
    • Geri on The Queer Parliament: “Exactly. I wrote a post saying basically the same but the gremlins ran away with it. Holyrood is an English…May 20, 23:31
    • Alf Baird on The Queer Parliament: “Northcode is right, the only remedy for colonisation is liberation. Everything else is just ‘noise’.May 20, 22:40
    • Geri on The Land Of No Laws: “The UK is becoming Totalitarian on two fronts & they’re both connected. Gender ideology & Z ideology. Permeating into every…May 20, 22:21
    • jock on The Queer Parliament: “Dugdale, chair of Stonewall, is married to the depute FM. Surely a conflict of interest?May 20, 22:15
    • Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “Aye Hatey. Northy’s Brave New World. Even the martians got sick of listening to it.May 20, 22:04
    • Rob on The Queer Parliament: “Folk are missing the main point with the two main dodgy characters the greens put in. It is not their…May 20, 22:01
    • Red on The Queer Parliament: “We need mass deportations of the Green Party and their idiot supporters. No reason at all why Scots should tolerate…May 20, 21:39
    • Northcode on The Land Of No Laws: “What utter piss poor sophistry. Laughable. It’s probably a good idea to take a look at the formal dictionary definition…May 20, 21:30
    • Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “That final sentence. Harsh but fair. Anybody think this new HR 5-year sentence just commenced will impoverish Scots to such…May 20, 21:10
    • Alf Baird on The Queer Parliament: ““the UN should step in to break up the UK” That may be wishful thinking, tho international laws on ‘a…May 20, 21:08
    • Lorncal on The Queer Parliament: “Twathater: that was always my own misgiving, that views such as Craig Murray’s and others’ would undermine the ‘independence only’…May 20, 21:06
    • sam on The Queer Parliament: “Since you ask, Alf, (you probably know already) the answer is yes. Funding education in schools, supporting conversion therapy banMay 20, 21:05
    • Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “Didn’t he live in a hole in the ground too? But please cut Northy some slack. He’s provided us with…May 20, 21:05
    • Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “You forgot to say that only you can see them, Geri. Oh, and the biolabs. You forgot them too.May 20, 20:58
    • Hatey McHateface on The Queer Parliament: “@Lorncal I’m afraid you’re wrong and CC is right. We need our own Trump to move fast and break things.…May 20, 20:48
    • Geri on The Queer Parliament: “They’re there working in the background. The Clinton’s established a network of disrupters from all over the world that are…May 20, 20:44
    • Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “You remind me of the infantry man in Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds.May 20, 20:34
    • Geri on The Land Of No Laws: “AI Dan Get over yersel. The GCC, that you apparently love, are authoritarian monarchies, have awful human rights records &…May 20, 20:23
    • Captain Caveman on The Land Of No Laws: ““It’s something we see often with you lot… must be an English thing to gang up thegither and bully folk…May 20, 19:59
    • GM on The Queer Parliament: “It is a racket, nae doubt.May 20, 19:56
    • John McNab on The Queer Parliament: “The reference in the opening excerpt from ‘Trainspotting’ to no more guys or girls, just wankers, was first aired in…May 20, 19:51
    • Geri on The Queer Parliament: “The death cult brings censorship, sweeping changes to the law, population control & snoopers charter. Colonisers love division. It takes…May 20, 19:37
    • Northcode on The Queer Parliament: “Here’s a plan… Scotland and the indigenous Scots can’t change a single thing about their government, their country, or their…May 20, 19:27
    • Captain Caveman on The Queer Parliament: ““However, let’s not crow too soon, because far right is just as bad as far left, so we need the…May 20, 19:20
    • Northcode on The Land Of No Laws: ““Well that’s interesting Northcode, because above Geri stated that this country was in fact a democracy.” Yes, Geri did state…May 20, 19:17
    • Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “Aye Sven. I need to know more about this 77 Brigade. What’s their mandate, who funds them, who is the…May 20, 19:14
    • twathater on The Queer Parliament: “As you are more than probably aware Lorna I was on WOS repeatedly urging and begging Stuart Campbell to at…May 20, 19:06
    • Mark Beggan on The Queer Parliament: “No. They got into that mess all by themselves. What damage could any of the security forces do to what’s…May 20, 18:59
    • Onlooker on The Queer Parliament: “But the corporations have already basically destroyed all political systems, rigging them in their own favour. They are the (world)…May 20, 18:53
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