Wings Over Scotland

It appears the Scottish Parliament – the great and mighty engine of a proud nation’s democracy, with a declaration carved onto its very walls that it’s a place built for the people to peeble their representatives wi’ stanes should they displease them – is now such a fragile, cowering, timorous house of straw that polite middle-aged women are being ejected from its public galleries for wearing the wrong colour of scarves.

Although it’s apparently fine for the Parliament’s shameful excuses for lawmakers to use colours to openly display their own ideological allegiances to the other side.

We suppose we should be grateful nobody had any ribbons to hand, or a full-scale terrorist alert might have been declared, riot police deployed and martial law declared.

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As a rule I try not to respond to the literally dozens of deranged attacks on this site that are posted by James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, but I really dislike being called a liar so I’m going to take a moment for this one.

James appears to have taken extraordinary offence to a two-paragraph stats post I put up to mark Wings’ 11th birthday this week, and has written two purple-faced rants about it. So for the record’s sake I’m going to comply with his demand as best I can.

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Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before, readers.

Because you won’t be wrong.

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As you might expect, our return to Twitter yesterday caused quite a commotion among the more sensitive flowers on the social media platform. At the head of the pouting mob was of course our dear old pal SNP MP Pete Wishart, who was clutching his pearls as usual about such terrible elements as ourselves – “vile abusers” – putting people off independence.

And at such times, it’s useful to remember how much he cares about independence:

Because by his own admission, Pete Wishart would sell out Scottish independence at its most crucial moment for the sake of getting to wear the Speaker’s silk gown – adorned on special state occasions with golden lace, frogs and a wig – in the House Of Commons and uphold all its ancient traditions like a good little Briton.

Scotland’s whole future, 300 years of struggle to regain control of its own destiny, could hang in the balance, held solely in the hands of one man, and rather than disappoint the grey eminences of the British establishment and risk being frowned upon in their oak-panelled subsidised dining rooms, Pete Wishart would say “No”.

(We don’t know if you get an even bigger pension for being the Speaker than the £50,000 or so a year that Wishart will trouser when he leaves the UK Parliament after 20 years of spectacular non-achievement, but we’d be prepared to hazard a guess.)

There’s a word to describe people like that, which is never used on Wings, but we’re making an exception just this once.

All cleared up in slightly under three years.

How long this situation will last is unknown – New Improved Elon Musk Twitter is still stuffed with all the same activist moderators it was before, and we don’t doubt that the SNP’s purple-haired sturmjugend will even as we speak be engaged in an obsessive frenzy of malicious reporting and complaining to try to have us shut down once again.

Hopefully they won’t succeed, and hopefully some other unjustly-banned accounts such as those of Graham Linehan, Dennis Kavanagh, Holly Lawford-Smith, Meghan Murphy, Claire Graham, Maya Forstater (currently locked out) and far too many more to list, mostly feminist women, all suspended for basic statements of human biology, will soon be restored too.

But rest assured that in the meantime we’ll be having as much fun as possible.

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Someone had to remind us that today is Wings Over Scotland’s 11th birthday.

In a grim indictment of Scotland’s once-vaunted political new media, a site that’s been officially closed since May 2021 is still far and away the most-read in the country, despite that readership now being mostly angry overgrown children squabbling with each other in the comments. People would apparently still, by a vast margin, rather read that than endure the tedium of Bella Caledonia or Believe In Scotland.

We’ve said pretty much all that there is to be said about that miserable state of affairs already, so we won’t repeat ourselves. God help the independence movement.

In the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the Scottish Greens received just 4.7% of all the votes cast. (255,314 of 5,419,544). The SNP got 44% – almost 10 times as many.

So we’re not sure how the Greens – a party that well over 90% of Scots don’t support – suddenly appear to be in charge.

Nor, perhaps more to the point, do we understand why.

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Blue-haired brain vacuum Kirsty Blackman in Westminster yesterday, during the SNP’s big showpiece “let’s pretend we’re doing something about independence” debate.

So presumably she’s made it a priority since being elected seven years ago, right?

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Kezia Dugdale, the hapless leader who took Scottish Labour to 14% in the polls, is one of the most extravagantly-paid people in Scotland who has no discernible talent or significance to public life whatsoever.

As well as being the Director of the John Smith Policy Centre (a job with no known responsibilities but which nevertheless pays around the same as being an MSP making laws in the Scottish Parliament) she writes regular columns in The Times and The Courier and is now, hilariously, the new Professor of Practice in Public Service in Glasgow University.

(A post with unspecified duties and unknown salary and which was also not, as far as anyone can tell, ever publicly advertised.)

We were bored so we thought we’d find out, via Panelbase, if her latest lucrative role was perhaps the result of a noticeably impressive performance in the first one.

Ah. Not so much.

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A year and a quarter ago, we contrasted the performance of the SNP’s last two leaders in terms of building support for independence. As the First Minister crows about how much better she’s been at staying in power than a succession of UK leaders, it seems only proper to bring the stats up to date.

(Click pic to enlarge.)

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Do you remember, readers, how the next UK election was supposed to be a single-issue de facto referendum on independence if the Supreme Court ruled Holyrood didn’t have the power to hold one itself?

Well, it appears that policy has been abruptly and quietly ditched.

Because just a couple of hours ago SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford told BBC News that “I can assure you” the SNP “will have a growth manifesto” for the whole UK whenever the next election comes around, because in his view the UK economy hasn’t been growing enough for the last few decades and the SNP would have a plan to fix it. Because apparently fixing the UK is the SNP’s purpose now.

Guess we better hope for a good result from the Supreme Court, then.

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The only major prediction this site has gotten wrong in the last decade is that we didn’t think Theresa May would be so stupid as to call a general election in 2017.

And while the prediction itself wasn’t vindicated, the reasoning behind it certainly was, because she duly lost her majority just as we said she would, and limped pitifully into oblivion over the next two painful and shambolic years. (While Nicola Sturgeon ponced around hopelessly trying to stop Brexit instead of saving Scotland by getting it the hell out of the UK before it was too late.)

So it’s in that spirit that we’re going to stick our necks out once again and predict that despite the opinions of most political pundits Liz Truss is going nowhere any time soon, because as incredible as it seems, she’s almost certainly the least worst option for the Conservative Party right now.

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