Wings Over Scotland

Today’s Sunday Herald has a rather low-key piece (it’s just the 7th-placed story in their “Referendum News” section) on the ramifications for a Yes vote of the 2015 UK general election. It comes the day after several papers carried vitriolic attacks from Unionist politicians on the SNP’s Angus Robertson for suggesting that the UK government ought to consider delaying the vote for a year to enable independence negotiations to be completed.

“This is yet another brazen stunt by the SNP to drive a wedge with Westminster”, raged the Scottish Conservatives’ Jackson Carlaw. “It is highly presumptuous of Angus Robertson, a man with clear delusions of grandeur, to be talking about postponing the next general election”, he continued, while Labour’s shadow Scottish Secretary Margaret Curran bleated about an extra year of Tories.

But it’s rationally almost impossible to make any other argument.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re going to enjoy this one while we can, because there’s a big barren fortnight across the last week of December and the first week of January when no politics happens at all, so we probably won’t see these sorts of numbers again for a while.

Crivvens.

Read the rest of this entry →

The realisation that the No camp’s reaction to the independence White Paper has been based on a massive, scarcely-believable misunderstanding/misrepresentation of reality has thrown a new light on all sorts of things from the past week.

The most recent “BLACK HOLE!” story is a case in point.

Read the rest of this entry →

This morning we’ve been double- and triple-checking our story from last night, because we were so sure we must have missed something. Even given the low esteem in which we hold the integrity of the hapless “Better Together” campaign, we felt that they surely couldn’t have made such an idiotic and fundamental error, and that instead we must have misinterpreted a word or a sentence somewhere along the way.

But no. We were wrong in that assumption. They really ARE that dim.

Read the rest of this entry →

We saw this graphic on the “Better Together” website yesterday, but we dismissed it as uninteresting even by their playground-propaganda standards, amounting as it does to nothing more than some startlingly feeble carping along the lines of “These are their forecasts, but we’ve made different forecasts so theirs must be wrong!”

But an alert reader observed that it was MUCH stupider than that. Can you spot why?

Read the rest of this entry →

As a living embodiment of the posh, braying public-school Tory-boy stereotype, Fraser Nelson of the Spectator used to reside in our “Zany Comedy Relief” links bar until we kicked him out for rarely lowering himself to write about Scotland.

But his guest appearance in today’s Telegraph we enjoyed at least parts of.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you missed it, Nicola Sturgeon’s extraordinary cross-examination demolition job on Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael can now be seen on the STV website. And if you’re pushed for time and can’t spare the full 19 minutes, here’s the gist of it:

…until it’s gone. Wings Over Scotland is normally protected by a brilliant spam filter called Akismet, which blocks the constant flood of fake comments that assails every website on the internet. Akismet has filtered out 1,496,404 of these attempts to sell you counterfeit fashion, hardcore porn sites and attempts to steal your bank details since we started, in amongst the 120,297 real comments we’ve published in that time.

Last night it suffered a temporary outage, with the result that the four or five “pending” comments we usually wake up to in the morning – ones Akismet thinks are spam but isn’t 100% certain about, and so puts in a queue for us to look at manually – have been replaced today by 1,877 (and rising – an hour ago it was just over 1,000).

Here’s what this means for you.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s been quite the week, so to celebrate smashing our all-time one-day pageviews record twice in succession, here’s a wee And Finally… bonus extra.

You’ve probably already seen this on Twitter today, after alert reader “Corstorphine Craig” knocked up an inventive graphic from some old material and sent it to us, whereupon we retweeted it and it went rather viral. But it deserves a front-page spot.

Viewers of a certain age will of course recall how well the coal mines, Ravenscraig, Linwood and Bathgate all flourished in the safe hands of the UK when Scotland was swindled out of its Assembly despite voting in favour of it.

But as the parties of the Union and their tame media fall over themselves to rubbish the sensible, achievable vision laid out in the White Paper this week, it never hurts to remember how their scare stories usually end.

Comes at 1m 43s, courtesy of the You Couldn’t Make It Up Department:

“Let’s have a debate” – Labour’s solution to all ills.

Dear Yes Scotland,

Please immediately contact Channel 5 and ask them how much they want for this:

Pay any price they ask, and show it on September 17th. 100% Yes, in the bag.

(Download links 1 and 2.)

Read the rest of this entry →

No, we haven’t accidentally put up this post again.

Read the rest of this entry →