Wings Over Scotland

This morning’s Daily Record, and also some newspapers, report that booze-ruined internet troll and convicted violent criminal George Foulkes – who’s spent several decades of his political career campaigning to abolish the House Of Lords, and all of the last one sitting in it as Baron Foulkes of Cumnock – has dreamt up a wizard new wheeze to enhance the Scottish Parliament by giving it its own chamber of peers.

The thirsty noble aims to avoid the undemocratic nature of the UK Lords by making the new “senate” an elected chamber. But in an uncharacteristic development that will shock innocent readers to their cores, he doesn’t seem to have thought it through.

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It’s probably time we had a series of these. So here’s #1.

scandal (noun) – a situation where no known crime has been committed and nobody has been interviewed by the police, yet which apparently contrasts in some way with other situations about which the exact same applies.

(Can often by identified by presence of Scottish Labour MPs/MSPs describing claims of entirely legal activity as “very serious allegations”.)

As the Scottish media winds itself up to full speed with “SNP BAD” columns about the Forth Road Bridge closure, an alert reader spotted an interesting old quote in Hansard featuring a gentleman you may recognise.

“Mr. Darling: Do the Government still want to proceed with the building of a second Forth road bridge, which would devastate the constituency that the Minister seeks to represent at the next election? Have the Government changed their tack? Do they now accept that there needs to be a co-ordinated public transport strategy to deal with the transport needs of Edinburgh and south-east Scotland?

Will the Minister make the Government’s position clear so that we know whether they want to build this ridiculous bridge?”

We invite anyone who may perhaps just be arriving at work after an unusually long commute this morning to imagine a Scotland where Mr Darling had been listened to, and the prospect of a replacement crossing was still several years away.

There’s absolutely no news today – Scottish politics already seems to have packed up for Christmas – so why not watch a nice documentary instead?

Altered States has been available in episode form for a wee while now, but McMaster Media have kindly put together a full-length cut exclusively for Wings Over Scotland.

It’s a fascinating analysis with lots of insightful chat from – among others – the likes of Derek Bateman, Paul “Wee Ginger Dug” Kavanagh, James “Scot Goes Pop” Kelly and Christopher Silver, to whose pre-indyref “Scotland Yet” it’s basically a post-indyref counterpart, and it’s a perfect way to pass a slow, rainy Sunday.

Tuesday, then Saturday:

Bless ’em.

We’ve had some gremlins in the works since yesterday, folks. Please bear with us.

On Wednesday the Daily Record ran this story:

It didn’t have to wait long for the “questions” to be answered.

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This is Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, quoted in the Independent On Sunday on the 15th of November, just two and a half weeks ago.

That’s interesting, isn’t it?

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Tonight we watched as the conclusion of a “debate” in the UK Parliament saw the “opposition”, almost unprecedentedly, sum up the same case as the government, to roof-raising cheers and applause (which is now apparently permitted again) from the Conservative benches for a Labour shadow minister.

We were rather put in mind of a famous Neil Kinnock speech from 1985.

Alex Salmond in the Syria debate with the non-pacifist case against bombing.

(Features brief cameo appearance from Alberto Costa MP, noted twat.)

It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.

(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)

So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.

It turned out that we were wrong.

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The meme of the week among the Unionist media and politicians is once again that the SNP is a sinister Borg-like organisation where independent thought is outlawed.

Bewilderingly, this evening Labour MSP Neil Findlay bitterly tweeted a complaint that all of the SNP’s elected members apparently agreed with his own position on bombing Syria, the vile swine that they are. (Presumably he’d prefer if some of them voted with the Tories just for the sake of it.) But he’s not alone.

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