Wings Over Scotland

A famous quote commonly attributed to Albert Einstein (and hotly disputed, as always, by point-missing Quote Nazis), runs that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.

It’s been bouncing around our heads for the last couple of days, because with the SNP annual conference in full swing in Glasgow, Scottish political pundits have taken it upon themselves to start issuing bizarre assertions/advice about the party’s strategy for securing a second independence referendum.

This version, from the Herald’s cut-price David Torrance knockoff Mark Smith today, is no more than we’d expect from that source:

But we were a lot more surprised to see the notion also being taken up by someone we’d previously credited with a lot more insight and intelligence.

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Alert readers will be aware that while the absolutely mind-numbing empirical stupidity of Scotland’s latest batch of Unionist MPs and MSPs is a recurring theme on Wings, we’ve never attempted to place it on any sort of formal footing. And to be honest, that sort of laziness on our part is no longer sustainable.

Because folks, look at the pure state of this:

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the inaugural Thickest Politician In Scotland.

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Especially alert readers may have noticed that we’ve had a new page on Wings for a while, maintaining a current list of Scottish newspaper circulations.

We were just checking it today and noticed that – seemingly unreported anywhere – the Scottish “regionals” had had their biannual figures published, so we thought we may as well keep you updated.

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Tens of thousands of people had a party in Edinburgh today.

They caused no trouble, spat on no priests, and everyone involved had a ball.

And for some reason that really, really upset Unionists.

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The plugin which normally embeds our Twitter feed on the Wings front page still isn’t working (doubtless because Twitter have made yet more spiteful and idiotic changes to their API), so those of you who don’t use the social media platform may have missed out on a gem this morning from everyone’s favourite Labour ultra-moderate.

Phew! Saved from economic devastation! Sounds like a narrow escape!

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When the news is slow, we sometimes steel ourselves and go for a little paddle in the Yoonstream – a private collection of the most unhinged hardcore-Unionist accounts on Twitter – and see what they’re getting themselves all worked up about.

For a good few months now, they’ve all been posting mad graphs like this:

And we’re not quite sure why.

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For our money – and by an admittely wafer-thin margin over the likes of Annie Wells, Miles Briggs, Alex Cole-Hamilton and James Kelly – Tory list MSP Jamie Greene is still the lowest-watt bulb in the Scottish Parliament’s festival of lights.

(Our alerter readers may have spotted that that’s an official watermarked Scottish Conservatives pic, so that’s them making him look as intelligent as they can.)

But being really properly brainless isn’t just a matter of not knowing which powers are devolved before you attack the Scottish Government for your own UK administration’s failings or not being able to do basic arithmetic.

To stand out as especially doltish in a group of epic dolts like the current Tory cohort in Holyrood, you also need to be incapable of following simple logical trains of thought. So let’s see if we can illustrate with a topical example.

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It’s probably time we started collecting all the media articles from the last couple of weeks about our ongoing legal battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, because it’s getting increasingly hard to plough through them all.

The story that Labour were pulling Dugdale’s legal funding was first broken by the Huffington Post on 19 September. Below is all the coverage we’ve found between then and now (most recent first). As best as we can recollect, incidentally, we’ve been asked for quotes for TWO of these stories.

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We honestly don’t think they even see it, folks.

We truly don’t.

We’d hoped not to have to write any more about this for a while, but a story broke this evening on left-wing Labour website Skwawkbox that we thought those of you not on Twitter would want to see.

Following a previous piece casting huge doubt on Dugdale and the Scottish media’s version of events, the site got hold of a letter (dated yesterday) from Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby to Mary Fee MSP, who’d sent a complaint about the party’s decision to stop funding Dugdale’s legal costs.

And it’s quite the read.

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Three days ago, the Daily Record’s political editor and Kezia Dugdale’s chief media cheerleader Davie Clegg tweeted that Scottish Labour had “expressed full support and solidarity” for their former branch manager in her court battle with this website.

It seems fair to say that the tweet hasn’t aged well.

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Politics in 2018 is almost impossible to satirise, and nowhere more so than in Scotland, where at least two of the main parties are currently campaigning on the principled policy of “any referendum we lose should be re-run, and any we win must never ever be held again because the decision was final”.

So it’s quite understandable that the Dateline 2018 team – Scotland’s only currently operating satirists of any kind (which is, madly, true) – opted not to bother with any Scottish content in their last series. But they’ve totally promised that they’ll absolutely definitely do some this time, honest, if you fund them for another one.

Yeah, we’d be sceptical too. But they only need £7,500 by tomorrow to carry on, and if they don’t reach the target you get your money back, so if you just got paid and can spare a couple of quid then fire it their way by clicking on the pic, because frankly we don’t like to think about what they’d get up to if we don’t keep them occupied.