Wings Over Scotland

On the very fabric of the Scottish Parliament – specifically its Canongate Wall, across the road from a building curiously called “Watergate” – are inscribed 26 quotes, carved into stone hewn from every corner of the country, about the sort of Scotland that the building and those working inside it are supposed to stand for and aspire to.

One of them, from the celebrated author Sir Walter Scott, reads thus:

“When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.”

It’s a phrase that’s hard to interpret as anything but a paean to stern accountability. Should our representatives, it says, fail to live up to the standards that we expect and demand of them, they should be pelted with stones.

Now, we must assume – for this is the 21st century, and public stoning is a barbaric act limited to but a few of the UK’s allies – that said stones were intended by the architects to be understood as metaphorical ones, presumably in the form of harsh criticism.

It’s alarming, then, that so many of the people currently trying to get elected to that Parliament apparently instead believe that any criticism of them should be a crime.

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Just when you thought it was over:

Suddenly there’s a weasel in the works.

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We couldn’t see any other outcome than this as soon as the decision was passed to the SPCB, because the Unionist parties have the majority of votes on it.

So it looks as though the Scottish Government’s desperate stalling is finally at an end, and two months after it was supposed to have happened we’re all about to have a very interesting day indeed. We can’t wait.

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While we wait for this story to unfold:

Let’s catch up on a few things. Scottish politics is moving very fast at the moment, and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss stuff.

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I first joined this union in roughly 1992. On the very few occasions that I’ve sought its assistance it’s been worse than useless, but I’ve retained membership for most of the period because I believe in the principle of trade unions.

However, there are limits, and they’ve just been breached.

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The following article by Conor Matchett appears in today’s Scotsman:

It’s a pretty standard anti-Wings smear piece, except for this bit:

which is simply a flat-out lie. We can’t speak for Kenny MacAskill, but we do know for sure that Wings has NOT been contacted for comment by Mr Matchett.

We have an easily-accessible contact form and our details are known to the Scotsman from the last time we had to sue them for lying about us, but we have received no communication of any form from any representative of the newspaper in connection to this story. (We’ve checked our email Spam and Junk folders.)

We’d happily have provided a quote if we HAD been asked, to give the lazy hatchet job (perhaps “Matchett job”) at least a minimal veneer of balance and fairness as a boost to the badly-ailing paper’s “trusted, fact-checked journalism”. Since we’re banned from Twitter, perhaps someone could pass that on to Mr Matchett.

In the meantime, Wings readers should look forward to some more posts from SNP politicians, which we’ll be publishing later today.

It would be improper not to note that in addition to this:

…Darren McGarvey has contacted me directly by email this evening with what I take to be a sincere apology, which I’ve accepted as such.

(It was a private communication and won’t be reproduced here.)

I have no problem at all with people disliking me and saying so – I’m hardly a shrinking violet – but I can’t abide hypocrisy, which is what the massive pile-on from friends of Neil Mackay yesterday amounted to, and while I couldn’t give the slightest toss about the opinions of the people involved, even one person doing the decent thing over what was said deserves to be acknowledged. While I’m sure that we’ll continue to disagree profoundly and strongly on many or most things, what’s right is right.

You give these BBC types a bit of money and fame and oh dear.

Not sure what the poor horse did, mind you.

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Yeah, that sounds about right.

(Thanks to an alert reader for that one.)

You can’t ask for more from a day than making this sleazy wee sexual pervert weep.

But be assured we’ll keep reaching for the prize time and again, folks.

Oh, and never, ever forget this true fact – Wings Over Scotland wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for James Mackenzie. We hope he’s in tears about that forever.

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Lady Dorrian’s full judgement and reasoning in respect of last week’s hearing involving The Spectator has been published on the Scottish Courts website.

It contains nothing that those who listened in on the case by telephone last week didn’t hear for themselves – it’s simply an 11-page summary of what was debated in court and casts no new light on what Lady Dorrian said at the time.

We’ll be very interested to see whether or not The Spectator – or perhaps more to the point its lawyers, who we must presume had vetted and cleared the initial publication just as Alex Salmond’s lawyers had – now feels able to restore the redacted paragraph that it removed after what it can now be publicly revealed was a threat from the Crown Office (a threat also received by this website).

The magazine’s response today is non-committal on the subject.

While it is this site’s belief that the paragraph in question DOES NOT identify anyone as a complainer – the Crown Office has not communicated which “other evidence” it feels could be combined with the paragraph, which makes no reference whatsoever to the criminal case, to provide identification – the restoration of the missing paragraph would certainly appear to provide circumstantial evidence to that effect, something which would be entirely due to the intervention of the Crown Office.

But overall, the needless delay in publishing this document has merely run down the clock on the inquiry by another week – time that it can ill afford – without providing any real additional clarity.

(We’re a bit puzzled as to why The Spectator’s counsel appears to have given up so easily on the second element of their application, which sought to specifically permit the publication of both Salmond and Geoff Aberdein’s written evidence.)

The fact that the judgement wasn’t released yesterday probably means, at a minimum, no more evidence sessions until next week, as the committee generally only meets on Tuesdays. We hope that doesn’t become a crucial issue, but we fear that the written judgement is sufficiently tepid that the crooked SNP members of the committee, and the spineless Andy Wightman, will use it to justify rejecting Salmond’s evidence and therefore hearing from him in person, rendering the entire undertaking moot anyway.

Ulster-bred (specifically the ultra-Loyalist stronghold of Antrim) columnist Neil Mackay, a man who’s been systematically undermining and dividing the Yes movement since at least 2015 while claiming to be part of it, has an opinion piece in the Herald today.

In its own way it’s an exemplar of the infiltrator’s craft. Let’s take a look.

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