Wings Over Scotland

Since David Torrance shows no sign of being willing to retract the falsehood below that he tweeted earlier today despite our requests, we’ll have to address it here. Apologies for the indulgence.

We can find nowhere that we made any allegation of Torrance being “paid” by RT. We tweeted that he’d “worked for” them, and said he’d “simply appeared on” the channel. Neither of those statements claims that any money changed hands. If Torrance says that he worked for RT for nothing purely in order to get some free publicity for his book, we’re happy to accept that at face value.

(Although we’re not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.)

But that’s not really the point of all the outrage over “The Alex Salmond Show”, is it?

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Yesterday’s Daily Record (which would increasingly be an accurate three-word name for the paper) ran an innocuous piece of page-filler fluff rubbish, and for once we’re not talking about a David Torrance column.

It featured the “psychic” predictions of a man who, the Record told us – no fewer than FIVE times in the opening few lines – previously predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, and who had a track record of “incredible accuracy”.

Sounds pretty spooky. Maybe he’s got the gift.

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Mainstream and social media alike are now well into their second day of an absolutely epic meltdown at the news that Alex Salmond is to broadcast a chat show on RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC.

It really is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the shrieking fit the decision has produced. Addled old Lords with criminal convictions for violently and drunkenly assaulting Her Majesty’s police have with an audacious lack of self-awareness decried the immorality of one of HM’s advisors going on TV to talk about stuff, and one Lib Dem MSP has even gone so far as to raise a Holyrood motion demanding that the state interferes with the lawful employment choices of a private citizen.

We imagine that RT will be beside itself with joy at the avalanche of publicity the UK press and political sphere is giving it. We’d be amazed if the hysterical brouhaha didn’t double or treble the audience figures that Salmond could otherwise have expected.

It’s just that it’s all a little, well, sudden.

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Today’s Cairnstoon will be along a little later. But in the meantime, if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Glasgow (or if you’re not, but hurry), today offers a rare opportunity go along and physically touch the magical drawing fingers of the artist himself, as Mr Cairns takes time out from his busy schedule of holidays to launch the second volume of his splendid sketchings, alongside other beloved Wings contributors Greg Moodie and the esteemed Wee Ginger Dug (plus his human butler Paul Kavanagh).

(Please note that Mr Cairns is currently carrying a rather painful spinal injury probably incurred during an an overenthusiastic golf swing, so we respectfully ask any readers who may be planning particularly expressive bearhugs or backslaps to ca’ canny.)

Series 3, #1.

No, it’s not her.

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Wings Over Scotland turned six years old this week (on Tuesday, to be precise). We didn’t make any fuss or hoopla because we didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about it, although we may as well note in passing that average monthly unique readership for 2017 to date has been 316,015 – that’s 24,000 up on the same period in 2016 and 16,000 higher than January-October 2015, despite this being the dullest year in Scottish politics since the site began.

(We did enjoy the replies to this nice tweet.)

But it’s just been brought to our attention that on our birthday the Scottish Government happened to publish its response to an FOI request from a notoriously mad and creepy Yoon troll who’s been repeatedly banned by Twitter but keeps coming back with new accounts. We thought you’d be modestly amused by it, because the Yoons are raging.

It’s been a difficult few months for a variety of reasons (although some of the technical aspects of that should improve in about a week’s time), but we’ll keep on keeping on.

It is with the heaviest of hearts, readers, that we must report to you that Gordon Brown has done an intervention again.

With a new book to sell, the purposeless former Chancellor and Prime Minister who led the UK into a catastrophic financial crisis that’s now entering its second decade has put on his hindsight goggles and made a whole series of bewildering proclamations after the event, which have – naturally – been dutifully received and repeated by the fawning Scottish press like God handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses.

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The Scottish Daily Mail runs this shock-horror outrage piece today:

Let’s zoom in a little closer on that, shall we?

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There was a nice moment at yesterday’s Scottish Independence Convention.

It was widely appreciated by Catalan people, none of whom (so far as we could see) took the expression of solidarity as implicit support for Catalan independence, only for freedom and democracy. But someone wasn’t quite so happy.

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This is the former Labour UK government minister, socialist and internationalist Brian Wilson in the Scotsman today, gloating and crowing that the democratically-elected government of Catalonia has been deposed and imprisoned (the latest in a series of arrests and jailings of leaders of the independence movement) for seeking to discover the will of the Catalan people in a referendum, in accordance with the mandate they were elected on – an act Wilson somehow contrives to describe as “tyranny”.

Wilson, whose Twitter avatar is a picture of himself with Fidel Castro, asserts that the Spanish government’s literally fascist coup and oppression of its people is a “lesson for Scotland”. We doubt we’re alone in finding that view chilling.

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We’re clearly going to have to make this a regular feature.

And it’s not as though the competition isn’t stiff.

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We’re not a Catalonian-politics website and we don’t even have an opinion on whether Catalonia should be independent, but sometimes it’s easier to understand the workings and failings of the media if you watch how it behaves on a subject you’re not directly and closely involved with. Last week was one of those weeks.

Below is a clip from yesterday’s edition of Sunday Politics Scotland. It features a man called José Rodriguez Mora, who was introduced to SPS viewers neutrally as simply an academic from Edinburgh University but was in fact instrumental in the creation of a stridently anti-independence Catalonian political party.

He was brought on to give voice to what has become the universal UK-media spin on events in Catalonia – that both sides are to blame, that the Catalan government was provocative and irresponsible to call an “illegal” referendum, and that the only way for the area to achieve independence is through the 1978 Spanish constitution, despite it expressly forbidding any such action and its cornerstone of existence (also known as the “Preliminary Title”) being “based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation”.

So in the striking absence of any useful information in the press, we thought we’d do a little digging and see how that might work.

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