Wings Over Scotland

The records have been tumbling like skittles at Wings Over Scotland – we’ve just notched up our biggest day of page views ever (last Friday), our biggest week, and our biggest month. Especially heartening was the fact that no single post provided more than 18% of the traffic for any one week, or more than 6% of views for the month – we were already comfortably through the 200,000 barrier even before Friday’s popular and widely-linked piece on the SFL’s farcical “reconstruction” proposals.

We also smashed the 1000-Twitter-followers barrier (despite a furious Twitstorm from No campaigners last Tuesday), set a new high of almost 23,000 unique users, and exceeded 50,000 visits for the first time. Thanks so much to everyone who’s come to the site, and particularly to those who’ve tweeted links, posted Facebook likes and all the other stuff that’s helped our readership grow by 1,675% since the turn of the year.

Now for the (slightly) bad news.

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We’re bored of the “debate” about a second question in the independence referendum. The facts are plain and beyond any sensible dispute:

(a) the SNP has a majority government, and therefore a legitimate democratic mandate to conduct the business of government – including the referendum – any way it wants.

(b) The party’s 2011 election manifesto promised a referendum – it did NOT, contrary to the No camp’s constant assertions, specifically promise a single-question one. (A lie the media bizarrely never challenges.)

(c) All referenda in the United Kingdom are advisory rather than legally binding, so the reservation of the constitution to Westminster under the Scotland Act is therefore irrelevant, and

(d) …is in any event over-ridden by the universal principle of self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Charter and the Declaration Of Human Rights.

So that’s that. This blog, however, neither supports a two-question referendum nor believes for a moment that there will be one. As we’ve said numerous times, Alex Salmond has manoeuvered the Unionist parties onto the ground they instinctively want to occupy anyway – that of denying the people of Scotland the right to select their preferred form of government from the full range of choices – and has neither the desire nor the intention to actually put a second question on the ballot paper, which would all but guarantee the failure of the goal for which he has worked his entire adult life.

But more than that, a two-question referendum is unacceptable no matter which side you’re on. If we’re discounting the simple and reasonable “Yes-Yes” formula of the 1999 devolution referendum – as it appears we must on the grounds of Willie Rennie’s mendacious and disingenuous “51% rule” – and insisting on either-or voting, then the only legitimate number of questions for the referendum is either one or three.

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The most-read WingsLand posts of the last seven days, for the thousands of new readers who joined us during a record-breaking week. (More on that tomorrow.)

The lead parachute
Tackling the crazy SFL reconstruction proposals

A stitch-up for Frankenstein FC?
…and the reasons why they’ll never be enacted.

Revealed at last: the positive case
Analysing the Better Together website’s case for the U***n.

Savaged by a poodle
Willie Rennie attempts to extract political capital from dead soldiers.

Better Together leaked posters #6
…with an astonishingly hypocritical reaction to this.

Dumbing doon
Sitting through Better Together – The Movie.

Better Together leaked posters #8
Another in our popular series.

The end of the day
Why there’s no way back for Rangers this time.

Eyes wide shut
Joy over a sinner repenteth.

Weekend essay: the Janus-faced Olympics
Yesterday’s Scott Minto piece crashes straight into the top division.

Right then. Around 14 hours after we first saw the SFL reconstruction proposals, we’ve just about coaxed our eyebrows back down off the ceiling and cranked our jaw shut again. Without further ado, let’s take a wild and wacky journey, line by line, through the tacky Powerpoint presentation comprising the most…

• stark-raving-bonkers
• howling-at-the-moon
• loopier-than-a-box-of-Fruit-Loops-looping-the-loop-over-the-Leeds-City-Loop-Road
• lights-are-on-but-the-hamster’s-got-the-house-keys
• ten-sandwiches-and-seven-cans-of-lager-short-of-a-picnic
• madder-than-a-suitcase-full-of-weasels-in-a-tumble-drier
• wasn’t-April-Fool’s-Day-three-months-ago?
• oh-my-God-they’re-actually serious

…document ever issued in the entire long and murky history of Scottish football.

We’re going to assume you know the fundamentals already, and will therefore get straight down to the analysis. Buckle up, readers, it’s going to be bumpy.

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The BBC is reporting today that the Scottish football establishment hasn’t yet resigned itself to a reanimated zombie form of Rangers playing in Division 3 of the SFL next season. Despite half-a-dozen SPL clubs having made it clear that they won’t allow Charles Green’s new company directly back into their league, and despite it being the overwhelming wish of almost 100% of the fans of every other team in Scotland – and a large percentage of Rangers fans too, for varying reasons – that any new club start at the bottom, the craven moneymen of the SPL are still trying to find ways to get the Ibrox side back into the top division with the absolute barest minimum of delay.

It’s a mindboggling plan, and one we find it hard to attach much credibility to for a whole raft of reasons. Let’s look at just a few of them.

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Now, let’s get something straight right from the start: the headline on this feature ISN’T referring to the people pictured below. We’re sure they’re fine, lovely, good and honest Scottish folk you’d be happy having live next door to you, who just happen to disagree with us on a particular political issue. Nothing wrong with that.

But the “Better Together” campaign’s launch video appears to have gone out of its way to make them appear to be simple-witted idiots, in order to try to disguise the utter hollowness of its argument.

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On the few occasions we’ve bothered reading Better Nation in recent times, it’s usually been as a result of something posted by Kirsty Connell. She’s penned several thoughtful, interesting blogs since joining the editorial team, and we’ve even tweeted a few of them before now. Today’s piece, in which she explains why she’s finally lapsing her membership of the Labour Party, is unmissable.

We won’t keep you from it, but there’s one enormously telling phrase in particular in the post. Connell dates many of her doubts about Labour back to a traumatic experience when campaigning in the famous Westminster by-election in Glasgow East, a deprived area whose troubles she attributes to “a Thatcherite government [which] strangled funds to a Labour-led council”. Perhaps it’s some last remnant of tribal loyalty which prevents Kirsty from coming out and saying it: the “Thatcherite” government strangling those funds went under the banner of the Labour Party.

The Glasgow East by-election took place in 2008. By then, the “Labour” government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already been in power at Westminster for 11 years. Even as the party’s support reaches all-time lows in Scotland, a dogged hardcore of wilfully-blind loyalists continues to desperately gloss over the fact that Labour long ago abandoned most of the honourable socialist values and principles on which it was founded and surrendered to Thatcherite ideology in order to grab power. We rejoice that one more member, in a long and continuing line, has seen through the deception, and hope that the others will one day choose to open their eyes too.

So we’d probably better comment on Willie Rennie’s personal attack yesterday. It was hardly surprising, and indeed a little flattering that the leader of a formerly-major political party would take time out of his day to send out a press release excoriating little old us and our insignificant wee blog, but it’s still a tad disappointing to see a senior politician happy to tell so many lies in a few short sentences.

We’ll skip through it quickly, then move on with our lives.

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