Wings Over Scotland

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Total at 8am, 23 May: £108,126. Last 24 hours: £836
(Includes donations from all sources)

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I’ve just been out to vote in the European elections, because as a rule I think people should vote in stuff. And while it was a very difficult choice, in the end I voted for the only sane option. (Click pic to view.)

I truly believe it’s the best choice for Britain.

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(Full series here.)

Almost nine in ten Scottish voters now back a second referendum on independence. This rather startling news was brought to us at the weekend by an unlikely source, in the form of walking brain vacuum Annie Wells MSP.

Wells was absolutely unequivocal that NO other vote this Thursday – not Labour, not Lib Dem, not Brexit Party – would constitute opposition to a second indyref.

(She emphasised the point by RTing a tweet from the Scottish Tories’ boorish and obnoxious head of media Adam Morris which described both Nigel Farage and Vince Cable as “weak on Scotland’s place in the UK”.)

So how are those numbers looking?

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We watched the whole of the Labour shadow Scottish Secretary’s interview on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland, and can confirm that this is a wholly accurate representation of what she said on it with regard to Labour’s position on Brexit.

So for those of you keeping score: Labour does NOT support a second referendum, does NOT support the current deal, does NOT support no deal, but WOULD vote for the current deal if it included a second referendum, and would INSIST on a second referendum on any alternative deal.

Honestly, we have no idea why anyone’s still confused.

The Herald has a story this morning about the Secretary of State for Scotland, a man who readers may recall promising that Scotland would benefit financially from the UK government’s £1.5bn bung to the DUP (which then didn’t happen), and threatening to resign over Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (which he didn’t do, then denied ever saying), and promising to do everything he could to oppose a no-deal Brexit but then abstaining on a vote to rule it out (and refusing to resign despite being a government minister who had refused a government whip).

Older readers may also remember Mundell as someone who voted against the repeal of the homophobic “Section 28” legislation in the Scottish Parliament despite being a closeted gay man at the time, and who voted to effectively ban IVF treatment for gay couples but now works for a lesbian mother.

But demonising Boris Johnson? Who would ever do such a monstrous thing?

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6th May

On April 26th, the International Lesbian Day of Visibility, a very obviously physically male Twitter user sent tweets to accompany photos of himself in which he claimed to be a lesbian (he also commented “down with cis”).

Juliet Smollett, a feminist gay rights campaigner (and mother to a lesbian daughter) replied to him “you’re not a lesbian”. For this she was said to be committing “hateful conduct” and her account was permanently banned.

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Ruth Davidson led on numeracy (or as Tories call it, “numberacy”) at FMQs today.

And we can see why she’s concerned.

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We see that “giving you chores to do and calling it a present” is back:

Sigh.

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Last week, Norway rubbed our faces in it again.

In just THREE MONTHS, the investment return alone from its national oil fund was around £64 billion – more money than the total annual budget of Scotland, including both Scottish Government spending and money spent by the UK “on our behalf”.

(If you click that link, you can see the value of the fund increase and – less frequently – decrease live in hypnotic real time. We watched it for a few minutes, during which time it added over 220m Krone, or around £20 million.)

That’s like making more from three months’ interest on your bank account than your yearly wage. It’s what Scotland could – would – have had if we’d been independent since the 1970s, because we’ve produced slightly more oil from the North Sea in that time than Norway has. We just gave all ours away.

But we know that that chance has been blown now, and rather than enjoy bountiful interest windfalls we make crippling interest payments on the UK’s debt, to the tune of around £3.5bn a year, while being told we’re scrounging subsidy junkies who should be grateful for having been relieved of the troublesome burden of our wealth.

None of this is any sort of new information, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves regularly of what being in the UK has cost us over the decades – and what it could cost us again in terms of the remaining oil and the potentially even greater resource of renewable energy that our naturally-blessed country sits amid – if we don’t have the courage to take responsibility for ourselves.