If you haven’t seen them already, a few shots of our ads on the Glasgow Subway, paid for with a small slice of fundraiser money and pictured by some alert readers.

We can’t be certain, but we think this is the first time a news-and-commentary website like Wings has ever taken out real-world advertising anywhere in the UK.
See ’em while you can, though.
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Category
admin, navel-gazing, pictures
We’ve noted several times recently an increase in the intensity of the No campaign, which has really been ramping up the rhetoric and menace since the turn of the year. But it’s also been accompanied by a growing sense of denial, as every poll showing a shift towards Yes is dismissed with the use of ever-more-selective comparisons.
Last night as part of its coverage of the latest polling, Scotland Tonight retweeted a comment from Oliver Milne, the Chair of Scottish Labour Students:

You know how we love to check facts, readers. Let’s check the facts.
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Category
analysis, scottish politics, stats
We think we might have just worked out why Scottish newspaper sales are in irreversible decline, readers. It’s because if you buy the papers for about two weeks you can just keep them in a drawer, bring them out a few weeks later and read all the same stories again without having to pay for them twice.

Because in the Scottish media, every day is Groundhog Day.
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Tags: ticktock
Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
Still not a single email, nor even a simple acknowledgement, in response to our list of polite, factual questions about Labour’s proposals for “enhanced” devolution. We also tweeted every member of the Devolution Commission with a Twitter account yesterday to ask if they’d be replying, and haven’t had a response from any of them.
Tune in tomorrow for the latest developments!
Category
comment, scottish politics
There’s an interesting survey over on the Herald at the moment. Self-selecting and therefore non-scientific, it’s nevertheless quite intriguing, with (the paper notes) strong support for the Scottish Government’s positions on childcare, Trident, renationalising the Royal Mail and encouraging more flights from Scottish airports, but opposition to its plans to cut Corporation Tax.
A couple of the other results, though, are reported a bit more oddly.
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Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics
Our collection of toe-curling Johann Lamont interviews from Labour’s party-conference weekend wouldn’t be complete without the longest one, in which the BBC’s Brian Taylor proves that while he might be a toothless pussycat as an analyst, he takes no prisoners as an interviewer.
It’s been impossible to avoid a negative tone in the last few days, readers, because the Scottish Labour conference is like a dark storm-cloud of hatred, raining grimy, toxic lies and hypocrisy into the political landscape, and the print media wallowed around in the evil, sucking glaur it produced until everything was thick with concealing mud that plugged the yawning holes in the party’s promises.
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Category
comment, scottish politics
So far we’ve had no replies – not even automated form ones – from any of the members of Scottish Labour’s “Devolution Commission” we emailed these questions to. They’re fair and reasonable questions, asked politely on behalf of 200,000+ Wings readers and all Scottish voters, and there’s no conceivable excuse not to answer them. We’ll be keeping on at this until we get some. The email we sent is below.
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Tags: Devo Nano
Category
scottish politics
We’ll be honest with you, readers, we just couldn’t face transcribing Johann Lamont’s latest traffic-accident of an interview, this time 12 unforgettable minutes on Sunday Politics Scotland. But we did have a sudden flash of inspiration.
Above you can watch the interview for yourself. But although Johann’s mangled syntax and non-sequitur approach to answering questions is just too much pain for our poor tortured brain to endure twice in one week, we realised that what’s a lot quicker and easier to do is write down the gist of proceedings.
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Category
scottish politics, semi-transcripts, video
We were going to inflict Johann Lamont’s latest BBC interview on you tonight, but frankly you’ve suffered enough for one week – it can wait until the morning. Instead, for this evening’s And Finally, we’ll let you enjoy another wonderful shot of some of Ms Lamont’s colleagues, this time at the end of her keynote conference address.

Well, we say “at”. Possibly we mean “as a result of”.
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Tags: and finally
Category
pictures, scottish politics
We’ve just had a listen to our dear old pal Duncan Hothersall, who gamely appeared on Aye Right Radio this week to attempt to explain/defend Labour’s stillborn “Devo Nano” proposals. He wasn’t able to shed a lot of light on them, but in fairness we suspect that’s more down to the tangled, incoherent, illogical state of the proposals themselves rather than any shortfall of ability, so we’ll move on.

Indeed, the discussion raised more questions than it provided answers, and we’ve made a short list of some of them which Scotland’s journalists might want to crib from the next time they’ve got Johann Lamont or Anas Sarwar in front of a microphone.
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Category
analysis, scottish politics
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

It’s one of the most famous lines in the history of cinema. I’ve heard it a hundred times. And lately, to me, it’s a pretty fair summation of everything that’s gone wrong in Scottish Labour’s relationship with both its own members and its voters.
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Tags: James Forrest
Category
comment, scottish politics
Earlier this week we noticed the curious lack of media coverage of the “Devo Nano” report. As the document spelling out Labour’s “more powers” offer to Scotland in the event of a No vote, its release was ostensibly the most important milestone so far in the independence debate, so we found it very strange to see it get such a muted reception, particularly from the Daily Record.

Two days later the explanation arrived, in the form of the so-called “Red Paper”. Described by some journalists as a “mini-manifesto”, it was a 64-page uncosted wishlist of vague feelgood notions like reducing child poverty. (A brave, daring and controversial step there to be sure.) And this time the papers were all over it.
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Tags: Devo Nanosquirrelsvote no get nothing
Category
analysis, comment, media, scottish politics