Wings Over Scotland

The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.

The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.

The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.

But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.

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You can’t do this, you know. You just can’t.

These things cannot both be true.

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Holiday Boy is sadly incapacitated today – ironically, having injured himself on his last holiday – but fortunately we do have some graphical content for you, having just been leaked this copy of the SNP’s campaign poster for the next general election.

You can almost smell the mince and carrots, can’t you?

Last night a by-election hustings was held in Rutherglen to which all 14 candidates were invited to hear and answer questions from the electorate on women’s issues. The SNP, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates all declined to attend. But the SNP, at least, was represented at the event.

Or at any rate, just outside it.

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The Scottish National Party, in legal character, is what’s known as an unincorporated association. (The same form of entity as Wings, local colour fans.)

This has a number of interesting ramifications.

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Tonight an SNP MP tweeted this:

“Desperately”, eh?

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To be honest it barely seems worth marking the ninth anniversary of the indyref. The day our nation – albeit narrowly – bottled out of becoming a real one again is nothing to be celebrated. The supposed party of independence has run away from the fight, concerned only with feathering its own nest, and its era of power looks to be drawing to a bitter and deserved close.

But there remains one grave and glaring grievance.

And no matter what anyone says, it’ll dog democracy and condemn Scottish politics to eternal stagnation until it’s addressed.

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The key word here is “DEMAND”.

Because we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?

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Huh.

But hey, maybe it’s just one of those things where you only get a drop-down menu and there’s no option for “Scottish”, yeah?

Oh. Well, there you go then.

I’ve known my mate Chris since I was five years old and we lived next door to each other in a council scheme in Bathgate. He’s a grand lad, the sort of Rangers fan that you can introduce in polite company, a hardworking, small-c-conservative successful business owner who’d go out of his way to help you and has a few SNP councillors in his social circle.

He isn’t the least bit political. In 2014 he was a soft No whose vote was narrowly tipped by the fact that his company did almost all of its business with English clients and he feared losing them to red tape (and, ironically, English nationalist sentiment) after indy, but after the Brexit referendum he was leaning very much more Yes.

The SNP’s staggeringly incompetent rule since then blew that chance and has pushed him further back into the No camp than he ever had been before, but last night he texted me “can’t believe this actually went to print and came through our door today”.

I can’t say I blame him.

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There’s an interesting new blog today called “Will support for Scottish independence go away?”, based on some analysis of long-term polling and demographic trends. If you don’t have time to read all of it, its conclusion is, well, non-conclusive. But the problem with it is that it’s asking the wrong question.

Wings has very little doubt that polling support for Scottish independence will continue to fluctuate within a few points either way of 50% for the forseeable future, as it has done for the last decade. But the real question is whether that will matter.

Because there are other issues with very similar numbers.

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I’ve always been obsessed, in cultural terms, with pivot points: the precise moments at which something significant changes irreversibly.

They can be a goal that ushers in a football team’s golden era – for me, Alex McLeish putting Aberdeen level in the 1982 Scottish Cup final. They can be a twist in a movie, like (first example that comes to mind) the shocking revelation of the bad guy in LA Confidential. They can spring out of nowhere, like the latter, or be something that was visibly on the way but finally crystallises, like the former.

There are some great examples to be found in the world of pop videos, like the one 3m 40s into Pulp’s epic mainstream-career-ender “This Is Hardcore”. But for my money there isn’t one more spine-tingling than this:

(Warning: some adult content.)

Robbie Williams here is played by Humza Yousaf.

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