Wings Over Scotland

It’s no easy task picking the dimmest of the new intake of Unionist M/SPs. Competition is stiff, what with the likes of Jamie Greene (Con), Dean Lockhart (Con), Jamie Greene (Con), Christine Jardine (Lib), Jamie Greene (Con) and Paul Sweeney (Lab) all putting up a strong showing on a regular basis.

But we have a new(ish) contender for the crown.

The above story is feeble enough as it stands, even allowing for it being a desperately slow news week for Scottish politics. Maureen Watt is 66 years old and has asthma, and making a pensioner with breathing difficulties sprint a mile to get to a speech on time probably isn’t the most cost-effective way for the Parliament to save four and a half quid, once you’ve factored in the cost of the ambulance and everything.

But it gets worse.

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This was Jamie Ross of Buzzfeed at the SNP conference yesterday.

But not everyone was having the same experience.

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Sometimes it’s hard for Yes supporters in Scotland not to be a bit jealous of Catalonia.

Despite their would-be nation being only a little bit bigger than Scotland, and despite being faced with very real physical and legal intimidation, the Catalan independence movement regularly manages to put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.

Yes marches and rallies in Scotland, by comparison, often struggle to get attendances numbered in the hundreds, largely because squabbling factions refuse to get along with each other and by far the biggest entity in the Yes movement – the SNP – wants nothing to do with them.

Marches don’t win independence, of course. But what does?

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All anyone will remember of Theresa May’s speech to the Tory conference:

We referenced this a few days ago because we definitely remembered it happening, but we’d been unable to actually locate the evidence, and at Wings Over Scotland that sort of thing bothers us. After a very considerable amount of effort we’ve now tracked it down, so we’re bunging it up here to preserve it for the record.

(At that point host Frank Skinner gave up and moved on.)

It’s from one month after the indyref, and the interesting thing is that Robinson is twice given the opportunity to respond to Skinner’s question about whether he thought that the pro-Yes supporters had any sort of fair point about his alleged bias, and both times – rather than, say, just dismissing it with a quick “Of course not” – he ducks it.

Readers can, as always, make their own judgements.

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Amid the horror of events in Catalonia yesterday, the Prime Minister of the UK – quite unintentionally – said something during an interview on the Andrew Marr Show which was highly pertinent not only to the Catalan referendum but to British domestic politics too. We thought it needed saving for the record.

We couldn’t agree with her more.

We’ll be keeping this post updated throughout the day with news as it comes in.

Remember as you look at these images: this is a modern European state reacting to an entirely peaceful democratic movement and process in 2017.

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What’s going on in Catalonia today:

This site can’t claim to know enough about Spanish and Catalan politics to have an opinion about whether independence for Catalonia is a good idea or not. All we can say is that democracy is a good idea, and the draconian and extreme attempts of the Spanish government to suppress the referendum – ludicrously under-reported in the UK media, particularly broadcast media – are a terrifying throwback to its fascist past. We very much hope they don’t succeed.

It’s always interesting to make the news.

But the BBC man seems a little confused.

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As readers who were once children will probably recall, papier-mache is a substance in which incredibly flimsy material – such as tissue paper or newspaper – is turned into something rather more hard and durable by dint of combining multiple layers of it with a simple flour-and-water solution.

What’s less well-known is that the process also happens IN newspapers.

For a case study, let’s look at this article in today’s Times.

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The Scottish Daily Mail almost explodes with fury over new crime statistics today:

Which is weird. Because there’s less crime in Scotland than there’s ever been at any time in modern history. How do we know that? Because the Mail tells us so.

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It’s embarrassing to even have to point it out, to be honest.

Yet just six months later, with nothing having changed, everything had changed:

But when it comes to Unionist politics in Scotland, embarrassment is the default state.