Wings Over Scotland

What’s even the point any more?

Even if you don’t buy into any of the persistent health concerns about aspartame, there are already TWO chemically-sweetened Irn Bru brands (Sugar-Free and Xtra) for the people who can stomach the foul taste of fake sugar. But now nobody will be able to choose a version without it.

Alongside whisky, Irn-Bru is arguably THE iconic branded product of Scotland but now 120 years of history have just been casually crapped on and thrown aside in the name of the nanny state and corporate greed (aspartame is dirt-cheap compared to sugar, and Barr – having ruined Tizer, Red Kola and its other drinks the same way years ago – also wants to avoid the UK government’s sugar tax taking a bite out of its profits).

Let’s just shut down Holyrood, rebrand as North Britain and be done with it.

On today’s news that support for independence is back up to 47%, and that Henry McLeish is calling for federalism again, whatever that is.

(NB In 2009 apparently “home rule” actually meant “independence”. Keep up.)

Scotland has 2,174 miles of trunk roads, of which 1.7 miles (that’s just under 0.08%) comprise the Queensferry Crossing. For the next few days those 1.7 miles are going to be subject to some partial lane closures on the southbound side for maintenance.

They’ll cause almost no disruption, because as it happens there’s another very similar bridge conveniently located just a couple of hundred yards away – linked directly to all the same roads – that traffic will use instead.

Not much of a story, is it? We don’t know how many miles of Scotland’s roads have roadworks on them on any given day of any given week, but we suspect it’s quite a lot. It tends not to make the news beyond a few seconds on the traffic bulletin at the end, but today was different.

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Cash is tight in Scotland’s Unionist-run councils.

If only there was something they could do to bring more money in, something they’ve been demanding the Scottish Government do for at least the last seven years and which the councils now have the power to do for themselves.

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God bless ’em, they just never lose the faith, do they?

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Back in the summer we sang the praises of one of Scotland’s tiny semi-handful of pro-independence print organs, the splendid iScot. So it seems only fair that we should offer the same courtesy to the other one we mentioned at the time, The National. It’s three years old today – how the time’s flown – and its editor Callum Baird wants your support. Over to him.

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We wouldn’t say that the Scottish Daily Mail was obsessed or anything, but this is just today’s hysterical coverage of possible changes to taxation in Scotland which haven’t even been PROPOSED yet, let alone actually passed into law.

A couple of bits caught our eye in particular.

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The efforts by the Scottish Tories to pull off some frankly ambitious shenanigans over today’s Budget continued overnight in increasingly bizarre fashion.

As with the Poppy Scotland funding, the party appears to be quite openly punting the line “We knew all along that this was possible and the right thing to do, but we deliberately punished Scotland for not electing enough Tory MPs”, in what can only be reasonably interpreted as an attempt at blackmailing future electorates.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is doing its best to sell the issue as “a plague on both their houses”, holding the Scottish Government and UK government equally culpable for the mess. So let’s see what we know.

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Yesterday’s edition of the Scottish Mail On Sunday devoted most of a page to a weird column from Ruth Davidson (in which she appeared to believe that Alex Salmond was still the First Minister), crowing about the great deal that Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs have supposedly won for Scotland in this week’s coming budget.

The first alleged fruits of the deal were revealed today.

That tweet is quite disturbing in itself, because what it unmistakeably implies is that if Scotland had voted for more SNP MPs in June and fewer Tories, the UK government would have retaliated by spitefully punishing innocent war veterans.

And Poppy Scotland weren’t too pleased about being weaponised either.

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This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.

Alex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.

The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.

(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.)

Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood.

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We’ll be honest, readers – if this doesn’t make you want to leave the UK all by itself, it may be that there’s nothing that ever will and we should just give up.

(Alternative titles considered for this piece included Live And Please Let Die, Doctor Oh God No, The Barely-Living Daylights and Quantum Of Bollocks.)

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This documentary starts a little slowly, but becomes an eye-opening case study of how Labour steamrollered through crippling PFI contracts to build public infrastructure on the never-never when they ran the Scottish Executive from 1999-2007.

We highly recommend giving it a watch.