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The member for The Vow 211

Posted on July 02, 2015 by

The Sunday Post’s lobby reporter James Millar noticed today that all the parties have submitted their nominations to sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster.

scotaffairs

As has already been noted, the majority of the committee – seven from 11 – are MPs for English seats (list below). But one name in particular caught our attention.

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The Vow remains an orphan 103

Posted on February 24, 2015 by

Another letter from the government. Sounds a lot like the others.

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The shattering of The Vow 304

Posted on October 16, 2014 by

We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.

eggpromise

And you’d think that’d be bigger news.

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What Are We, And Where Are We Going? 211

Posted on May 26, 2025 by

Don Paterson is a celebrated Scottish poet, writer and musician. The essay below comes from a new anthology of Scottish writers called Irish Pages: Scotland, and is reproduced with his permission. 

Remember The Vow? Most of us have tried to forget it. This was Westminster’s Hail Mary as polling day approached in the 2014 referendum; a vote that Yessers – people tend to forget this part too – initially had no real expectation of winning, until an inspirationally positive campaign saw the polls draw neck-and-neck.

Then lo! There it was, splashed across the Daily Record: a fancy-font promise from Westminster party leaders that if Scotland voted to stay within the UK, we would enjoy new devolved powers. There was some other waffle about defence and opportunities and having an equal share in the UK’s prosperity. But the message was clear enough. We would be listened to.

Aye, right.

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After the swarm 72

Posted on September 11, 2024 by

On 15 October 2012, I signed the Edinburgh Agreement with David Cameron to secure the independence referendum of September 2014.

On the same day Peter Kellner of the polling company YouGov wrote one of his condescending commentaries from London dissing any hope for the Yes campaign.

“However, from Salmond’s point of view, it is about the only thing going for him. Indeed, were he to be given a truth drug, he might well curse the fact that the SNP won last year’s Scottish elections outright, and thus found himself in a position to keep his promise.

He would surely have been much happier remaining the leader of a minority government, unable to get his independence legislation through Holyrood. Then he could have railed against the Scottish satraps of the Britain-wide parties for silencing the voice of the Scottish people.

Instead, by winning an outright majority, he has shot his own fox. Rather than shed crocodile tears for his inability to call a referendum, he must now put the issue to the test.

As a shrewd and intelligent man – indeed, one of the shrewdest and most intelligent in British politics – he must know that his mission is impossible, that in two years time his country will vote to remain part of the United Kingdom, and that far from being achieved, independence will be deferred for at least a generation.

All YouGov’s evidence from the past four years is that independence is a minority passion north of the border. Even as the SNP was surging to victory last year, Scots told us by two-to-one that they wanted to remain within the UK.

The SNP won because most Scots thought it had governed their country well, because they liked Salmond, and because they thought the Scottish Labour Party was useless – not because they wanted to sever links with London.”

Kellner’s view was almost universal, and not just among the London pack of journos and politicians. Most, if not all, of the Scottish media agreed with him.

However, by September 2014 things looked very different.

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The Golden Shot 239

Posted on August 07, 2024 by

As any moderately heavy internet user will tell you, it’s very easy to get into a situation where you have literally hundreds of browser tabs open at any one time.

Every now and again you’ll go to clean them up and find something that you’ve been meaning to write about in a quiet moment, and this certainly counts as a quiet moment in Scottish politics, so let’s do this one now.

Because the story above is from March, but we don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone anywhere talk about just how weird it is, or what it tells us about the 2024 SNP.

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A Better Togetherness 359

Posted on May 15, 2024 by

The National have buried this pretty quickly in understandable embarrassment:

Because some things are just a little TOO on-the-nose for comfort.

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Yoons For Yousaf, Fascists For Forbes 135

Posted on March 13, 2023 by

The Unionist media in Scotland (ie all of the media in Scotland) usually keeps up a pretty united front when it comes to the subjects of independence or the SNP. So it’s been fascinating in these last couple of weeks to see a genuine schism develop between them on the subject of the party’s leadership election.

(For the avoidance of doubt, we do not include Holyrood Magazine, whose splendid front cover image that is, in “the Unionist media”.)

Right back at the start of the contest we highlighted The Times’ full-on love-in for Kate Forbes, but most of the Scottish press has now made their preferences clear. And you’ll never guess who they really, really DON’T want to be the next First Minister.

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Under Her Thumb 437

Posted on September 26, 2021 by

When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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A letter to the members of the SNP 313

Posted on March 28, 2021 by

Dear Friends,

Following considerable reflection, I am writing to tell you of a decision I have reached and to set out my reasoning.

My primary focus is and always will be achieving our shared ambition of independence for Scotland.

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What’s going on 365

Posted on September 28, 2020 by

The weekend just past saw a convulsion as big as any we can ever recall witnessing on Yes social media, triggered by a series of tweets by Nicola Sturgeon which caused an extraordinary negative reaction out of all proportion to their ostensible content.

The reason was that the First Minister – who had remained silent about countless episodes of hideous misogynistic abuse aimed from her own side at MPs and MSPs like Joan McAlpine and Joanna Cherry – had chosen to suddenly leap into action in defence of the toxically divisive horror that is Glasgow councillor Rhiannon Spear after Spear had been widely criticised for making blatantly false claims in a video promoting her attempt to be selected as the candidate for Argyll & Bute.

(Sturgeon had no such public condemnation for the torrents of abuse the SNP Twitler Youth then unleased on Kirsten Thornton, the female SNP activist and Generation Yes founder who’d pointed out Spear’s untruths.)

The move sent the party’s woke and sane factions into a frenzy of bloodletting which in itself will have little if any impact on the wider electorate, but nonetheless threw into sharp relief the life-and-death battle currently going on for the SNP’s soul.

And since that’s related to what we’ve been writing about on Wings for the bulk of this year, it seemed worthwhile to get some things down on the record once and for all.

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The Fantasist 365

Posted on November 07, 2017 by

It is with the heaviest of hearts, readers, that we must report to you that Gordon Brown has done an intervention again.

With a new book to sell, the purposeless former Chancellor and Prime Minister who led the UK into a catastrophic financial crisis that’s now entering its second decade has put on his hindsight goggles and made a whole series of bewildering proclamations after the event, which have – naturally – been dutifully received and repeated by the fawning Scottish press like God handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses.

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