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Some things stay the same 232

Posted on March 07, 2021 by

An extraordinary find by alert reader Ian Brotherhood in the archives.

(Click to enlarge.)

The paragraph at top right is a particular eye-catcher.

Some things stay the same 493

Posted on August 05, 2019 by

New polling today:

Scotland vs the Tories, with Scottish Labour on the wrong team. As it ever was.

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Some People Try To Fuck With You 85

Posted on April 20, 2025 by

Well, it’s always nice to be a landmark for free speech.

But let’s start at the beginning.

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Things can’t only get better 111

Posted on June 27, 2017 by

The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.

Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.

(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)

But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.

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Some things are simple 428

Posted on March 14, 2017 by

Judging by the first 24 hours, we’re in for a two-year festival of utter horror from the UK and Scottish media. Yesterday saw a never-ending parade of metrosplaining idiots dragged willingly in front of cameras and microphones to pontificate their clueless and mind-numbingly ignorant drivel about Scotland.

It wasn’t possible to keep track of it all, because it was frequently happening on five channels at once, and it was harder still to watch it for any extended period of time without hurling a brick through the screen in frustration at the offensive stupidity of it.

Feeding into that was a stream of Scottish politicians who actually did know better, but who are too catastrophically dim to adapt to changing circumstances and had no strategy other than to endlessly repeat the same cretinous soundbites over and over.

(Adam Tomkins in particular was ubiquitous, spending what felt like several hours on various airwaves reciting the same brainless 10-second schtick forever.)

The constitutional politics of the UK and Scotland are in flux, and many aspects of the situation are complicated. But quite a lot of them aren’t, and if we’re all going to make it through the next two years without stabbing each other in the throat, it’d be a lot better if everyone accepted the things that are definite, empirical, indisputable facts.

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Things we don’t care about 55

Posted on August 28, 2012 by

Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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Groundhog Decade 65

Posted on February 25, 2025 by

Welcome back to what will hopefully be normal service after we’ve been spending the last few days battling off a determined and temporarily successful attempt at hacking the site. Apologies to those who had clicks intercepted and redirected to a malware site which tried to get people to download dodgy .EXE files, but our readers are far too alert to ever fall for such things so no harm should have been done.

So back to business, which for us often means pointing out things that have been said in newspapers that aren’t true, which brings us to last Friday’s issue of The National.

Because the above simply isn’t what happened.

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The New Britain 562

Posted on December 03, 2024 by

So things are getting pretty strange.

Polling in Scotland, the UK and Wales in the last few days has shown Great Britain taking a fairly heavy swerve to the right after just five months of Sir Keir Starmer’s government. Labour now lead Reform (who have five seats to Labour’s 411) by just three points in the UK and are even more remarkably now in THIRD place in Wales, a country where the party has won every single election for over 100 years.

Scotland, meanwhile, is heading for a hung Parliament in 2026 in which – as this site has been telling its readers for the last year and a half – the only possibility of a stable administration will be an SNP-Labour coalition.

We live, as they say, in interesting times.

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A Delicate Art 255

Posted on October 26, 2024 by

Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.

When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.

And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.

Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.

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The Dogs That Think They’re People 85

Posted on August 20, 2024 by

In these grim times, at least we have funny animal videos to cheer us up.

Unfortunately when you write about politics for a living, everything is an analogy.

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The Absence Of Pride 67

Posted on June 24, 2024 by

When you’ve been watching Scotland playing football for 50 years of your life, you become accustomed to disappointment. You expect disappointment. Anything better than disappointment becomes a bonus.

You also come to expect injustice, like last night’s inexplicable failure of VAR – which has unfailingly spotted micro-infringements like a player’s toenail being offside – to even take a look at a nailed-on stonewall penalty in the last minutes of the game.

But because you’re so used to these things, you’re not expecting rage.

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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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    Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)

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    • James Cheyne on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Simplfied version Controversial but true. Save Scotland first and return it to full independence and automatically it carries a reset…May 9, 12:05
    • Lorn on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Hatey, the oil and gas are on the wane, although far from finished. Of course we have been lied to…May 9, 11:02
    • Aidan on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “@Andy – it is actually a good thing that the Green’s exist in some ways. There are a small but…May 9, 10:55
    • Lorn on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Sorry, Yoon, if you are answering me, yet again, none of that makes any sense. I have said consistently try…May 9, 10:50
    • Aidan on All Or Nothing: “@Dan – I don’t think that’s wholly fair, Stu has put forward two alternative approaches in the last 6 months.…May 9, 10:50
    • Dunx on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Without the English market Scotland’s wind farms wouldn’t exist at anywhere the current level. After indy I expect England will…May 9, 10:40
    • Sven on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “100%Yes Wish no more … I’m guessing you’ve just managed to get his back up, more bristly than a stickleback…May 9, 09:36
    • Dan on All Or Nothing: “Aye, good post Robert. I only drop in occasionally now as the latest site change means it’s now back to…May 9, 09:30
    • desimond on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “It must be so cosy when youre part of ‘The system’. The lovely warm feeling inside as your eyes slowly…May 9, 09:28
    • Andy Ellis on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Hardly a surprise surely? As polling consistently shows, you can expect around 10% of those polled to vote for virtually…May 9, 09:17
    • Rich on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “And the Gaza issue, you didn’t address that part?May 9, 09:09
    • Anthem on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “OT. Has anyone actually noticed that the English government has provided £600m to support a project that steals energy from…May 9, 08:42
    • The Flying Iron of Doom on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “You wouldn’t be referring to “Scottish Skier” by any chance, would you? I’ve noticed that said guy really, really, really…May 9, 08:22
    • Chas on All Or Nothing: “Maybe I could get a loan of yours Sam? I hear that it has hardly been used!May 9, 08:15
    • Chas on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “The last time I looked, there is an arsehole on WGD who constantly provides copies of polls and attempts to…May 9, 08:03
    • Vivian O’Blivion on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “The poll of polls (graph) on the Wiki page for Westminster voting intention is approximately as follows: RefUK 28.5%, Lab…May 9, 08:03
    • Hatey McHateface on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Hmmm. The BBC News (waves to Marie) is constantly full of examples of people being treated abominably. I’m afraid I…May 9, 07:49
    • Hatey McHateface on All Or Nothing: “Hail Confused, full of shite. Don’t you want to know which school I went to? You need to get back…May 9, 07:33
    • Yoon Scum on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Who do I vote for if I don’t want open borders immigration and I don’t want the North Sea to…May 9, 07:17
    • Yoon Scum on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “I’ve never seen you call out the moon howlers who are calling for English heads on spikes. Maybe you should…May 9, 07:06
    • Yoon Scum on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Brexit causes you a MAJOR problem with your campaign They promised instant wealth and total freedom as the Eu would…May 9, 06:24
    • Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on All Or Nothing: “Tentative translation of the Marquis of Montrose quatrain: He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small,…May 8, 23:10
    • Confused on All Or Nothing: “hail mia, full of grace, the lord is with thee … jesus was “antisemitic” : Ye are of YOUR FATHER…May 8, 22:52
    • Lorn on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “I think, Mia, the traditional Scottish Unionist vote and UKReform do not a double act make. They are coming from…May 8, 22:51
    • Lorn on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Neither, Hatey. It doesn’t have to be above 48% before a campaign starts. Calling the bluff of both Holyrood and…May 8, 22:45
    • Lorn on The Last Thing They’ll Expect: “Your tedious nonsense might apply to some nationalists, but, for the majority, we are very well aware that independence will…May 8, 22:39
    • Hatey McHateface on All Or Nothing: “Understood. I’m gonna assume that “wanking on and on” is an order of magnitude more serious than “wanging on” 🙂May 8, 22:17
    • Rev. Stuart Campbell on All Or Nothing: “Y’know, I’m not sure you were ever voting Yes, mate.May 8, 21:50
    • Rev. Stuart Campbell on All Or Nothing: “Fucksake, what do I have to DO to stop you people fucking wanking on and on about Israel and Palestine?…May 8, 21:49
    • Hatey McHateface on All Or Nothing: “Woo, check out the big guts on Mia. She’s standing by her words. There’s your route to Indy right there.…May 8, 21:39
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