Wings Over Scotland

It’s just been brought to our attention by an alert reader that we’ve been shamefully failing in the months since the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement to give credit where it’s due to Scotland’s champion in Westminster, the Rt. Hon. Michael Moore:

“Stephen [Williams, Lib Dem MP] is clearly a strong liberal voice for young people. We should be helping him build an unstoppable momentum for permanent change following the Independence Referendum next year, where another Liberal Democrat, Michael Moore, has secured the right of 16 and 17 year olds to vote.“

What with that and Jenny Marra MSP apparently being single-handedly responsible for the ending of the split-tickets fiasco on ScotRail (1hr 41m), it looks like we owe all the Unionist parties a big vote of thanks today. Our gratitude is literally unmeasurable.

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As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

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When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

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We like to jest at some of the more hysterical and ridiculous scare stories put out by Unionists about independence, but sometimes the joke just isn’t funny any more.

This week we listened to the “For A’That” podcast, which featured a range of bloggers including the pro-indy Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell and the rare beast that is a right-wing Green, in the form of new member and Liberal Democrat defector Douglas McLellan, once seen many moons ago around these here parts.

The last guest was ultra-loyal Lib Dem activist Caron Lindsay (above), tireless defender of Willie Rennie and front-bench policy in general. She provided much of the heat in the otherwise good-natured discussion, with a succession of furious tirades against the SNP, including several (eg on the “unanswered questions” about pensions in an independent Scotland) which could in fact have been easily cleared up with a few minutes’ use of the Wings Over Scotland search box.

One in particular, though, stood out as perhaps an all-time low for the No camp.

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On the rare occasions when we write something about football, and the Old Firm in particular, we always get a few angry comments from people complaining that it’s got nothing to do with politics and therefore has no business on an independence website. We trust this will put a stop to that argument once and for all.

The story is nonsense, of course, and it’s no great surprise that the original Sunday People piece doesn’t name its supposed sources. But the mere fact of the notion being aired in the UK press at all is pretty strong evidence that we’re not the only people who understand the connection between Scottish sport and Scottish politics.

We can’t claim credit for the idea. We just thought it needed doing a bit better.

We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

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