Wings Over Scotland

The recently-restored Wings Twitter account has a little over 56,000 followers, the vast bulk of them accumulated at a time when this site had far less reason to criticise the SNP or the Scottish Government. So while this poll isn’t scientific, the indy-friendly nature of the respondent base makes it pretty interesting.

Those numbers closely mirror what every actual proper poll tells us about Scottish people’s opinion of the GRR itself – they oppose it by margins of between 3:1 and 4:1. So if the Scottish Government is counting on the UK’s intervention to increase support for independence, frankly it looks like they’re onto a massive loser.

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…by which we mean “IQs in the history of the Scottish Parliament”.

Put a cushion on your desk before you start listening to this, gang, or you might hurt your jaw. Because surely nobody quite as paralysingly, catastrophically thick as this clueless, bumbling, deranged and dangerous imbecile has ever been allowed to make the laws of Scotland before. We wouldn’t let her make orange squash, to be honest.

And yes, we’re including Kezia Dugdale and Jamie Greene in that reckoning.

(If you weren’t aware, the UK government HAS now decided to use a Section 35 order to block the appalling Gender Recognition Reform bill. We support it wholeheartedly.)

Saw this on Twitter this morning. It’s pleasingly concise.

One day, even the diehards will see the pattern.

Okay, folks, time to put our hands up and admit it: we got this one wrong.

We thought they’d be subtle.

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We’ve been meaning to talk about this for a few days, but other stuff kept coming up.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

Alert readers won’t have failed to notice a steady drip of stories being fed to the media in recent weeks from SNP figures talking down the idea of the next general election as a de facto referendum.

Many in the party, such as new Westminster leader Stephen Flynn, are clearly very uncomfortable about having been pushed into doing, well, pretty much anything to actually try to achieve independence, even if it’s still two years away, because having (in most cases only recently) acquired themselves some lovely lucrative Westminster careers and pensions they’re not keen on suddenly risking losing them.

But the column above is an illuminating one.

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A few months ago, we all had a good chuckle at Pete Wishart’s screeching 180-degree turn on the subject of using a plebiscitary election for independence, a strategy which switched overnight from “suicidal, disastrous fringe lunacy with no hope of success” to “genius plan Nicola herself came up with”.

But after that crude ad-hoc field patch, we’re delighted to be able to report that Pete has submitted himself to SNP HQ for a full operating system update and is now fully compliant with the New Truth.

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For what these are about, see here. This one’s from 23 August 2019.

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I’m going to talk about this story for a bit, and I’m sorry because I’m as sick of this subject as everyone else is but it’s really really important. Tune out for 10 minutes if you must.

I’ve never been a person who suffered from blackouts. In my younger days I would frequently drink Olympian amounts of booze and pass out in a heap (and/or pool of my own vomit) under a table, but when I woke up I always remembered how I got there. I also went under general anaesthetic a couple of times at the dentist when I was wee, and always remembered counting down from 10 with the mask on before I woke up. (“10…9…8…zzzzzzzz”)

In my entire half-century on this planet, there’s only one gap in my memory. (Like, I don’t remember what I had for dinner on 8 July 1987, but you know what I mean. I remembered it the next day, just not any more.)

It happened when I was about 14, playing rugby at school.

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We don’t know how long our Twitter account will survive for this time. But even if it does, there are some threads which Twitter hides from its Search function, for reasons unknown. Try it yourself – search Twitter for any phrases from the text below. You won’t find them. (Also, some of you don’t use Twitter, so hey, new content for you!)

A handful of those threads mean something to me, so I’m going to preserve them here, unedited, for posterity, just in case. This one is from 24 November 2019. The tweet it references at the start is from a now-banned account so I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about lesbians being thrown off a Pride march.

[NB as it’s from Twitter, it’s a little bit swearier than you’ll be used to here.]

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I’m going to talk for a bit about why I care so much about this issue, because I know some of you are sick of it.

I’m opposed to the idea of self-ID on every possible level. It’s against science, it’s against reason, against tolerance, against women. But those are all intellectual, dispassionate judgements. They’re not the reason I feel so deeply about it.

The reason is lesbians.

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Alert readers of Wings will know that I have a fondness for sweet and fruity things, and a particular favourite of mine are Tropical Vibes still lemonades. (NB Other drinks are available, this site is in no way sponsored by or financially affiliated to Tropical Vibes.)

I especially like their Ocean Blue variety, a deliciously sharp and tangy refresher which contains real blueberry juice.

Just not very MUCH real blueberry juice.

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The response to our post of last night has been astonishing.

(Although we’re not sure how “new followers” is being calculated there. We actually have more than 500 extra followers since 8pm – we can only assume that it’s only counting those who right-clicked and followed from that specific tweet.)

And part of the reason is that it’s plain that almost nobody knew about the report, even though it came out three months ago (when Wings was still in retirement). We had to dig deep to find any media coverage of it at all, and what there was was cursory at best, and sometimes a lot worse.

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As a journalist, readers, sometimes you want to pep a story up a bit. From time to time, it’s perfectly legitimate to sensationalise a relatively minor aspect of something in order to draw attention to a worthwhile but intrinsically dull subject.

At other times, you find yourself in the strange position of having to talk a subject down as much as you can, because if you simply report the facts calmly and neutrally it’ll sound so outrageous and ridiculous and deranged that everyone will think you’ve gone full-on, tinfoil-hat, pencils-up-the-nose insane.

Today is the second kind of day.

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Alert readers may have noticed that our Twitter account has returned again. Hopefully this time it’ll last longer than a week under the inevitable barrage of attacks from transactivists and SNP MSPs.

(We haven’t had any contact from Twitter about it, people just noticed the account was live again last night and told us about it, so we don’t know what the reason was.)

And someone used the occasion to point out that it was exactly five years ago today that we published our first piece on the subject of “gender reform”.

It’s still quite a shocking read even half a decade down the line.

We’ve only actually had 93 posts on trans issues in those five years, or an average of about one every three weeks. We know it feels like more. And we know that some of you thought we’d gone mad when we started warning about it.

But hopefully some of you have realised just what’s at stake, and even if you don’t care about that, how much it might cost the cause of independence. We really hope we can stop talking about it soon, if only so we don’t keep getting banned from Twitter.