Wings Over Scotland

You’re going to need to before you watch today’s episode of The Jeremy Vine Show, featuring Paul Burrell (who used to be a royal butler about 20 years ago and somehow is now a political commentator), Nicola McLean (who used to get her surgically-altered breasts out for tabloid newspapers around the same time and then went on a reality show for halfwits with no actual talents), and Carole Malone, who we assume is some sort of live public-safety-information warning about the dangers of overdoing HRT.

Vine watches the unfolding horror with the expression of a man absolutely convinced he’s going to be murdered the next time he comes to Scotland. The most painful part is probably just after (Scottish) co-host and former weathergirl Storm Huntley (no, really) helpfully pipes up to suggest “shortbread, tartan… bagpipes” as Scotland’s economic foundations, at which point Jeremy turns in last-ditch desperation to the audience to save him from this slow-motion trainwreck and… well, you’ll see how that goes.

When the second indyref comes along, whenever the Yes campaign has a political broadcast slot on TV, we suggest just putting this on every time.

After five days I’ve had no response to this:

As Ofcom require any complaints about the BBC to be directed to the Corporation first, I’ve sent the BBC the letter below today (by physical mail, as the online complaint form is comically inadequate), which I expect to be a waste of time and energy. If I don’t receive a satisfactory response – and I’m sure that I won’t – I’ll take it up with Ofcom.

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Right then. Our 2019 crowdfunder is officially over (the page is actually still live at the moment because several readers have asked it be kept open until the weekend so they can make their own donations, but it’ll be finally closed down on Sunday night).

And good heavens.

The main page alone narrowly beat last year’s all-sources total (ie including donations made via other routes like direct bank transfers) by nearly £600, and the actual final figure for 2019 [EDIT: updated 24 June] is, jawdroppingly, this much:

£171,849

Blimey.

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My interview on this week’s Alex Salmond show:

Click the pic to watch.

A crude clip of this segment from Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC show yesterday is doing the rounds on Twitter at the moment, and it deserves both better audiovisual quality and a wider audience. If features Regan Morann, a rather confused Tory from Scotland who has quite an opinion of himself.

But for some reason, that swaggering self-confidence deserted him when confronted with the reality that Tories in the rest of the UK would throw Scotland (and Northern Ireland) under the bus in the blink of an eye if doing so was the price of Brexit.

An incredulous Fogarty, speaking for just about everyone listening to the show, asks “Where’s your self-respect?” as Morann burbles about debasing himself desperately in front of his English colleagues who don’t want him or care about him, and his eventual answer was enlightening, in a tragic kind of way.

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The UK’s political commentariat is afire with shock today over a new poll.

The poll showed that Tory members would by margins of around 2:1 willingly sacrifice Scotland and Northern Ireland – along with the UK economy and their own party – to make sure Brexit happened. Which is all very interesting, unless you read Wings in which case you knew it a year ago.

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The Times, 30 June 1998.

Wait, Michael who? Well, this should be good.

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Our 2019 crowdfunder now has just 24 hours to go, and to be honest it’s exceeded our wildest expectations. Despite the moribund state of Scottish politics over the last two years we’re currently around £3200 beyond the previous all-time record, and that’s just phenomenal. You never stop taking our breath away, folks.

But we’re going to rattle the tin one last time by repeating something we said last year.

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Looking forward to that reactivation.

(WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW.)

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Imagine our surprise, etc.

Well, they do say a day is a long time in politics, etc. But just like David Cameron did on the day after the indyref, it’s nice to be reminded once again that Tory “respect” for Scotland has an average lifespan of less than 24 hours.

We probably don’t push the annual Wings fundraiser hard enough. Sure, we tweet about it every few days, but other than that we pretty much leave it to get on with itself – we haven’t run an article about it since launching it nearly a month ago.

That’s partly because thanks to the phenomenal generosity of the approximately 1% of readers who’ve donated so far, we’ve very comfortably covered our basic outgoings for the next 12 months and then some – the vast salaries for myself and near-regular cartoonist Mr Cairns, of course, plus webhosting and various other operating costs (eg commission to the fundraising/payment processing companies), money for some more opinion polls and a boost to the Wings Fighting Fund.

But as it enters its last few days we’re going to nag you a bit now, because we don’t think there’s a better-value investment in the independence cause to be had anywhere.

With all costs covered, every £1 you donate from this point onwards will basically put FOUR copies of Wee Blue Book 2.0 through Scottish letterboxes when the next indyref happens, and if you know of a more practical and effective thing you can do to bring independence about with a quid then we’d love to hear about it.

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We were rather startled to learn this morning that Brian Donohoe, the former Scottish Labour MP for Central Ayrshire, had been awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s latest Birthday Honours List.

Not by the award itself, but because we assumed he must have done a lot of unsung charity work in his community or something. But no, the title was conferred purely for “services to Parliament and politics”.

So we thought we’d do a recap.

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