Wings Over Scotland

Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.

The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.

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The Guardian today reports the incredibly depressing news that “Labour voters [are] increasingly turning against the poor”, with growing numbers of the party’s supporters now blaming the victims of recession and austerity for their own plight.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the anti-poverty Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is quoted in the piece saying “The stark findings of this report highlight the increasingly tough stance people are taking against people in poverty. We appear to be tough on those experiencing poverty, but not tough on its causes.”

How can such a horrific, callous scenario, with the supposed party of the downtrodden and voiceless abandoning those who need the most support, ever have come to pass?

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The National carried a strange article yesterday, apropos of seemingly nothing, about a Brussels-based political thinktank supposedly linked to the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The piece actually originated on superwoke “fact-checking” site The Ferret a couple of days earlier, and professed to expose how the thinktank was “stoking Scotland’s culture war”.

Alert readers will already have pricked up their ears at this point, because “culture war” is a radical-left dogwhistle term used to obscure, belittle and dismiss groups (largely though not exclusively comprising left-wing feminists) fighting for the safeguarding of children and the protection of women’s and LGB rights.

And sure enough, nothing’s different this time.

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Mike Russell, currently at the centre of controversy over his appointment as chair of the Scottish Land Commission, hit the political big stage during Scotland’s first ever SNP administration under Alex Salmond, whom, in turn, Mike had previously seen into office as Salmond’s campaign manager.

In 2007 he was appointed as Minister for Environment, then in 2009 he became the Minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution, and his conventional ministerial career concluded when he went on to replace Fiona Hyslop as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning until the end of 2014.

Following the 2014 independence vote, the pre-referendum era ended with Salmond’s dignified (albeit temporary) stage exit; Nicola Sturgeon took the helm and began to reform what had been left to her by her predecessor.

A core pillar of Sturgeon’s centrist reform was the construction of an almost entirely opaque ivory tower of power from which both SNP and the state would run their covert affairs with subversive, centralizing, strong-arm granularity, cleverly camouflaging its sinister implications from the public through cult-of-personality media management.

Instrumental in this, among a very few select others, was Mike Russell.

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It’s been almost two years since I wrote the totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100 – also compiled and written by me – was published in 1991.

Obviously stuff has continued to happen on the Speccy scene since then, so it’s now, in some senses, not quite so definitive. Or at least it wasn’t, until I updated it, which I’ve just done, so now it is again. Of it. Or something.

(I appear to have a debilitating compulsion to write top 100s for no very good reason. There’s also this one, and I’m currently working on yet another as a distraction from the wretched state of politics, so fans of subjectively-numbered lists of extremely old videogames should definitely stay tuned.)

I also wanted to have it all in one post rather than five, so now if you want to see the videos of the original arcade games you’ll have to click the titles of each entry – only the Speccy videos are embedded within the article, so the page SHOULD now actually load up without falling over.

There are loads of new entries, a few position adjustments – don’t get TOO excited, Bomb Jack fans – and a bit of general tidying, but I haven’t rewritten the entire thing because it’s 33,000 words and I’m not a lunatic, although those two facts are mostly unrelated. So if you haven’t seen it before, go and get a cup of tea and some biscuits, because this might take a while.

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Until a few weeks ago Calum Steele was the chief of the Scottish Police Federation, so as due-credits go we particularly appreciate this one.

So let’s remind ourselves of a few things.

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…always stick with Wings, readers.

If you need ill-informed guesswork, that’s what the Scottish MSM is for.

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David Davis speaking in Parliament this evening.

The boy’s a timebomb.

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While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

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Last month saw the first meeting between the UK Brexit delegation and the EU’s, and by many accounts it fell far short of the UK’s expectations. David Davis spent months drumming up the “strong and stable” approach which would see both the divorce deal and the subsequent post-Brexit trade deal negotiated simultaneously. He was told by everyone that this wouldn’t happen, but simply brushed off the warnings. When push came to shove, he finally accepted that he’d have to negotiate the divorce deal first.

This is just the latest in a long string of failures and ineptitudes over the course of the UK’s handling of the whole farcical process and it got me thinking. If Scotland had voted Yes in 2014, what would it have looked like if the Scottish Government had handled that vote the way the UK has managed Brexit?

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It’s now more than a year since we said this:

And it’s probably time to start keeping track.

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What does racism and separatism actually look like? How would we know it if we saw it? What are its defining characteristics? Who are its advocates?

Let’s see if we can find out.

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