Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will already be aware that former Labour MP, minister and nuclear-power lobbyist Brian Wilson is one of our least favourite figures in the independence debate.

A man utterly consumed by tribal hatred of the SNP – even by the standards of Scottish Labour, which is no mean accolade – his Scotsman columns are some of the most mendacious, bilious propaganda to be found in the country, to the extent that we don’t even link to them in our “Zany Comedy Relief” section.

Today, however, he’s outdone himself in spectacular style.

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We are, as always, absolutely enthralled at the prospect of discovering from James Kelly what our vile secret masterplan has been over the last 18 months.

So we, at least, will be reading, James.

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Margaret Lynch is a former director of the anti-poverty charity War On Want, a former volunteer with Glasgow Women’s Aid and Strathclyde Rape Crisis Centre, founded the SNP Women’s Pledge and was elected to the Policy Development Committee of the SNP by the party’s members four months ago.

I’ve been a political activist for all of my adult life, firstly in the Labour Party for almost 20 years and then in the SNP for the last 23 years, and all my core beliefs and values have remained pretty constant throughout that time.

I’m a left-of-centre democratic socialist, internationalist and feminist.

A fair number of the folks that I was closest to in the Labour Party eventually ended up in the SNP – no real surprise, as we were labelled “Trot-Nats” by Brian Wilson when were in the Labour Party.

Unlike many Yessers I have the highest regard and respect for Brian – he is a values-driven politician and someone that I have always admired. The kind of country that Brian and I both want to live in would be remarkably similar. We just disagree about the route map of how to get there.

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A concept has recently arisen in Scottish politics for which this site feels at least partly responsible, and which is making the strangest bedfellows of Unionist commentators and SNP ultra-loyalists. It’s summed up very concisely in today’s Times.

Let’s just unpick that extraordinary meltdown for a moment.

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Anyone up for their taxes being used to bail out Scottish newspapers?

No, we didn’t think so.

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We’ve just taken our first week off in eight years, and no sooner are we back than the whole world’s turned on its head. Because this is Brian Wilson in today’s Scotsman.

The only thing we don’t understand is: if a Holyrood majority for independence will be valid in 2021, why isn’t it valid now?

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Michael Glackin of the Sunday Times is the only serious contender to the Scotsman’s demented Brian Wilson as the most poisonously, blindly instinctive hater of anything even passingly connected to the SNP or independence in the Scottish media. His weekly bilious rants in the paper make even Scottish Daily Express hacks wince and say “Blimey, that’s a bit strong”.

But even by those standards, this week’s column is quite something. So let’s take a little look at just how much of an idiot you can make of yourself if you never allow facts to get in the way of your rage.

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This is the former Labour UK government minister, socialist and internationalist Brian Wilson in the Scotsman today, gloating and crowing that the democratically-elected government of Catalonia has been deposed and imprisoned (the latest in a series of arrests and jailings of leaders of the independence movement) for seeking to discover the will of the Catalan people in a referendum, in accordance with the mandate they were elected on – an act Wilson somehow contrives to describe as “tyranny”.

Wilson, whose Twitter avatar is a picture of himself with Fidel Castro, asserts that the Spanish government’s literally fascist coup and oppression of its people is a “lesson for Scotland”. We doubt we’re alone in finding that view chilling.

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Yesterday we reported how the only people who were risking the privatisation of key ferry services to the Western Isles were the Scottish Labour politicians and media crowing about how the decision to keep them in the hands of publicly-owned operator Caledonian MacBrayne had been made for political reasons.

(Which, were it true, would render the award of the contract illegal under EU law.)

We had no idea how low they were about to sink.

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Poor old Daily Record.

What a distance to fall.

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The media seems to have more or less spent its load about Michelle Thomson for now. Having spent most of last week clutching at ever-more-tenuous straws to keep the story alive, it finally petered out over the weekend with a particularly desperate stab at reporting the SNP to the Electoral Commission over claims it worked too closely with Business For Scotland during the referendum campaign.

Triggered by a demented Nat-hating pet-shop manager who may be familiar to social media users for his overpowering obsession with both BFS and this site, it’s based on recent allegations from the Sunday Herald that SNP chief executive (and Nicola Sturgeon’s husband) Peter Murrell had expressed some opinions to BFS over their management, which have now been frantically spun up into a claim that the SNP and BFS were “co-operating” in the campaign.

This could in theory be the Electoral Commission’s business because there were rules governing spending limits which applied if two or more registered participants worked together. Scottish Labour have described the allegations as “hugely serious”, which cynical readers may feel is as good an indicator as any that they’re total horse parts.

The Electoral Commission appears to agree, telling the Herald that it “did not believe the revelations warranted an investigation”, but is obliged to look into the complaint anyway. We may be able to save them some time.

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Earlier today we highlighted some of the social-media charm of Labour blogger and BBC pundit Ian Smart, after the Scottish branch office deputy leader Kezia Dugdale demanded that the First Minister should take a more pro-active role in policing the comments of party members on Twitter and Facebook.

Mr Smart’s history of incredibly abusive and offensive comments stretches back many years. But of course, it wouldn’t be reasonable to berate Scottish Labour for its failure to act if it wasn’t aware of them. So we had a trawl through his Twitter followers list just to see if there was anyone who might have noticed and brought it to the leadership’s attention so they could have a quiet word.

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