Wings Over Scotland

Then:

And now:

Yes, still. Yes, again. But don’t worry, we still have a cartoon joke for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Labour Party.

You wouldn’t know it to watch the black-hole-scale mess our politicians are making of it, but the thing about Brexit is that it ISN’T an insoluble problem. That two of the supposed “partners” in the United Kingdom are being forced out of the EU against the will of their people is a political choice, not a necessity.

There are numerous perfectly viable ways to practically address the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain while Wales and England voted Leave, none of which are especially outlandish.

Last July this site put forward an idea that respects the referendum result in all four constituent nations and would have wide public support. Yesterday the Guardian published a variant on the concept with lots of strong technical detail. And earlier this week we suggested another approach which could break the current deadlock.

But the stupendously incompetent Tory executive running the government, and the equally useless notional Labour “opposition”, have both handcuffed themselves across the emergency exits, preventing any hope of escape from disaster as the country burns down around everyone’s ears.

We no longer have a union. We have a hostage situation.

Read the rest of this entry →

The extremely sharp and perceptive New Statesman writer Stephen Bush buries some of his political insight in a daily email newsletter (because, we assume, his fax machine doesn’t work, you can’t send telegrams any more and London flats don’t have enough room to keep a lot of messenger pigeons or let you send smoke signals).

And it’s a lot easier just to quote you a chunk of today’s than it is to rewrite the same observations into a new article ourselves.

Read the rest of this entry →

Nicola Sturgeon attended a meeting of the SNP NEC yesterday.

Or maybe she didn’t.

One of these people/publications, inescapably, is flat-out lying to their readers about the event in question. Given the Scottish media’s ingrained habit of lying about pretty much everything almost all of the time, we honestly wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to which one of them it was.

Blimey, that was quick. This was Tory MP Douglas Ross yesterday:

Short version: “I don’t care what my constituents want, I will vote loyally for the party I was elected as a member of.”

And this is him today:

Never let it be said Wings readers don’t get things done.

Last night the UK government lost a vote which, while largely symbolic, was designed to hamper its ability to generate its finances in the event of a no-deal Brexit (and therefore to try to incentivise it to avoid a no-deal).

A handful of Tory MPs voted for the motion, combining with the opposition to defeat the government by 308 to 296. No Scottish Tory MPs rebelled, however – despite having pledged when they were elected that they would vote to defend Scotland’s interests, something pretty much everyone agrees a no-deal Brexit would be a catastrophe for.

A reader contacted one of them, Douglas Ross, and forwarded their exchange to us, because it raises enormous questions about the entire UK political system.

Read the rest of this entry →

Wow. That’s Monica Lennon sat directly behind him, by the way.

That must have taken some amount of polishing.

Read the rest of this entry →

Scottish Labour mounted another of their infamous stunt “protests” today, as always dutifully assisted and advertised by the Scottish media.

STV reported it as an event organised by a small rail union – not the RMT or ASLEF, but the little-known Transport Salaried Staff Association – which would feature “other campaigners”, but in fact it was a Scottish Labour shindig from top to bottom, with no union branding visible anywhere and Scottish Labour on all the placards.

Well, we say “all”.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve got no words for this, so we’ll let it stand by itself.

Because 55% voted No. Welcome to Brexit.