Wings Over Scotland

So everyone’s fighting about Gaelic again. Provoked by a minor story about a Gaelic dictionary MSM and alt-media pundits are flying at each other with daggers over a language spoken by almost nobody on Earth and on which the government spends a few measly and irrelevant pennies, trying to turn it into a proxy war over politics and the constitution and fascism and genocide and goodness knows what else.

We’ve covered the political nonsense around the issue numerous times on this site, and we’re not about to do so again here. This, as befits the Soapbox section, is a purely personal view, which will doubtless attract more furious shrieking from the sort of people who long ago lost the ability to listen to a counterpoint – or indeed tolerate the mere concept of one – let alone consider it or debate it without abuse.

But hey ho. After a while you just learn to tune that stuff out, so let’s go.

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Holiday Boy is taking slacking to a new extreme to mark the onset of spring, and we’re sad to inform you that there’ll be no Cairnstoons on Wings for another couple of weeks while our intermittent satirist rearranges his Fabergé eggs or something.

Entirely by coincidence, yesterday we were doing some overdue admin, and as we filed away some previous bits of crayon-work we couldn’t help but be struck by the prescience of a few cartoons from various times, 2013 in particular.

So just in case anyone had forgotten (attention spans are short these days), here’s some of the insight we’re all currently missing.

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We weren’t going to do anything on yesterday’s disturbing development in the legal wrangle between the Scottish and UK governments over devolved powers and Brexit, because the rest of the media has been covering it at length and we don’t have any particular expertise or insight to offer.

But it was hard to ignore the striking turn of phrase used, not by some sensationalist partisan commentator but by the learned and sober QC Jonathan Mitchell, last seen acting for the petitioners in the Alistair Carmichael lie case.

It doesn’t pull any punches, but as a summary of the relationship London wants to put in place between itself and the devolved nations for years to come (Labour-run Wales has already caved), and which Unionist politicians and the more witless pundits are of course portraying as unreasonable grievance-mongering and failure on the part of the Scottish Government, it’s about as accurate a description as you’re ever going to find.

Alert readers may recall that the Electoral Commission recently chose, to everyone’s (cough) great surprise, to take no action against extremist Unionist shout-monkeys Scotland In Union over a number of clear breaches of electoral rules, or for failing to disclose a number of large donations from extremely wealthy donors.

10 days ago the EC published a tranche of FOI documents relating to the case on its website, with the donor details redacted to protect the identity of the various Lords, Dukes, Earls and Countesses who’d rather you didn’t know that they’d been handing thousands of pounds at a time to SiU.

Or at least, sort of redacted.

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As alert readers will recall, nowadays we only look at the Scottish Daily Express if we’re absolutely desperate for material, so this piece slipped past us a few days ago:

And since the only thing in the papers today is page after page of unbearable fawning drivel about the stupendously insignificant (fifth in line to the throne, will never ever be king unless a terrorist blows up Buckingham Palace with an atomic bomb, is roughly as important to the wellbeing of the nation as Hamilton Accies’ third-choice goalkeeper) royal baby, we figured we may as well have a look at it now.

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A beginner’s guide to how it works:

SUNDAY: The Sunday Times copies an SNP BAD nonsense story wholesale from the previous day’s Scottish Daily Mail.

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Even in a sluggish news season, it’s somehow extra-dispiriting to see a once-august newspaper like the Sunday Times fill its pages by trying to flog its readers reheated old cobblers from the previous day’s Daily Mail.

We’ve already shredded the towering stupidity of the story itself (the Times dutifully repeats all the exact same drivel about meal deals and loyalty vouchers), so we were pleased when social media presented a new angle on it.

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Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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From here:

(NB These rules do not apply to Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, etc etc. Like, duh. In a properly democratic country we’d be able to use FOI to actually see the blacklist, but this is the BBC we’re talking about.)

Because we have no words.

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Last night – at the insistence of the SNP – the House Of Commons held a six-hour emergency debate in the wake of the UK’s unquestionably illegal bombing of Syria at the weekend, under the supposed justification of a chemical attack that may well not have happened at all, far less have been the responsibility of the unfortunate country’s murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad.

(Loony left-wing conspiracy theorists casting doubt on Assad’s responsibility for what happened – or didn’t happen – in Douma include, er, Major General Jonathan Shaw, the former head of the UK’s special forces, and Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord under Tony Blair and Minister For Security And Counter-Terrorism in Gordon Brown’s government.)

The debate concluded with a token vote, not on whether the bombing was right or wrong but which merely asserted whether Parliament had “considered” the subject. (ie voting that it had NOT done so would have made a statement that the Prime Minister acted improperly by committing UK forces to a conflict without obtaining MPs’ assent.)

Faced with the opportunity to issue a symbolic public rebuke to the government for bypassing Parliament on a matter of war and breaking international law, the radical socialist opposition Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn… abstained.

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Scotland’s political opposition and media, today:

There can surely be no country on Earth cursed and plagued with a more pathetic shower of petty, whining, gossiping harpies in those roles than Scotland. And while we knew that already, barely a day seems to go by without them reaching a new nadir.

If you’ve got the stomach to hear about the latest low point, grit your teeth, lower your expectations of humanity considerably and read on.

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