Wings Over Scotland

A week ago, readers, I had not the slightest interest in bringing Wings Over Scotland back full-time. I had my Twitter account again and was having fun and I was happy with that. It scratched the itch of being able to engage with politics (and people) without the depressing business of wading in it for work.

Having enjoyed a summer of long sunny walks feeding the swans and refreshing lager shandies in riverside pubs, I was preparing to hunker down over the cold dark winter and finally get some much-delayed writing for the Wings memoir done.

And then I witnessed the quite extraordinary sight of an elected member of Parliament, in the shape of the SNP’s pico-witted ambulant brain vacuum Karen Adam, publicly gloating about having managed to shut down the voice of someone critical of her party.

At the same time, an extremely minor blogger (the word “rival” would be to over-dignify them) re-opened hostilities in his campaign of self-declared “open warfare” against this site, with a rapid succession of posts (just a few of dozens) forming such a demented scattershot tirade that to patiently debunk all of it would have taken until Christmas.

And I’ll be honest, folks, it all pushed my buttons a wee bit. It really shouldn’t have, but it was properly outrageous and I’m occasionally human, so I thought “Sod it, if I’m going to have to put up with all this crap anyway I might as well make it worthwhile”.

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The response to yesterday’s post was pretty unanimous. So let’s find out for real.

Wings Over Scotland has been produced for free for the last three and a half years. Our last operational fundraiser was in May 2019. Then again, we’ve been retired for nearly half that time, with only occasional new posts.

But Scottish politics has never been in a more dire state than it is now, with the SNP stolen from its members by a tiny cabal not interested in independence but only in power for its own sake and the “queering” of Scottish society, while the opposition is a worthless ragbag of hapless incompetents and the media is a national embarrassment.

And since Wings stood back from the fray 18 months ago, absolutely nothing has stepped up to take its place. So if you want the job doing, it looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves again.

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Right, as promised, one last piece of admin. (This post will be removed in due time.)

We left yesterday’s piece and the associated poll up for two full days to make sure the people who don’t read Wings at weekends saw it and had the chance to vote in it too. But in truth it was pretty obvious how the vote would go from about 20 minutes in.

Like, that’s not even a little bit close.

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When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

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An ongoing exception to this site’s retirement is for news relating to the scandalous imprisonment of journalist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, the only human in the history of the planet Earth ever to be jailed for the barely-defined pseudo-crime of “jigsaw identification”.

We had another phone call from Craig in HMP Edinburgh yesterday, and he continues to be in good spirits and be well treated by both staff and fellow inmates. He expressed great gratitude for the flood of mail sent by Wings readers in response to our appeal a couple of weeks ago – he’s been receiving up to 60 letters, emails and packages a day, which have been very much appreciated in helping him pass the 22.5 hours out of every 24 that he spends locked alone in his cell.

The prison authorities, however, imposed some bizarre restrictions.

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Ten years ago this month I was in a pub called The Porter in Bath with my girlfriend and her family, buying everyone whiskies and gabbling deliriously (I’d been up for over 40 hours at that point) about the significance of what had just happened.

Alex Salmond’s SNP had just broken the Scottish electoral system, winning an absolute majority of seats in a Parliament designed expressly to stop that from ever happening. A total of 72 pro-independence MSPs had been elected, and it was already clear that an independence referendum was going to happen despite the Labour Party’s best efforts. It was impossibly exciting.

This month I sat and watched 72 ostensibly pro-indy MSPs be elected again, but this time with my heart breaking, knowing that they would achieve nothing and indeed had no real intention to even try.

And I’ve had enough of feeling that way.

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So, this absolute bumhole has just achieved what the combined massed forces of the Unionist establishment and the SNP Twitler Youth alike couldn’t – she’s basically shut down Wings Over Scotland.

Stealthily making her way last night past all the fortifications designed to prevent her and her five associates (Pepsi, Daphne, Celeste, Coco and Rosie, if you’re interested) from travelling from the Palatial Rat Environment to the danger-strewn floor of the Wings office, the tiny furry idiot above holed herself up behind my printer, idly chewing on its USB cable to pass the time even though there was food everywhere, including the packet of biscuits the little sod had dragged down off my desk .

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Today is going to be by some distance the quietest one in Scottish politics this week, so I hope you’ll forgive me a personal indulgence, readers. Because while I just ignore unimaginably vast torrents of online abuse every hour of every day of every year, once in a blue moon some things get said that you just can’t let pass.

Paul Kavanagh made a lot of unpleasant personal-attack tweets yesterday off the back of an unpleasant personal-attack article on his blog, which I don’t propose to get into the many individual falsehoods and misrepresentations of here.

(While I believe his evidence in the Dugdale case actually did more harm than good, I don’t hold him responsible for that and I appreciated his willingness to try to help when others I’d considered friends had turned their back.)

But the comments above are too much to bear.

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Here at Wings it’s mostly our job to point out things that are broken. (Currently that’s mostly the SNP.) But there are also other more useful people working on actually fixing stuff. Readers might want to give them a hearing and perhaps offer some assistance and input of their own, especially as you can do it today without leaving your house.

It costs nothing and it starts at noon. All you need to participate is the virtual meeting software Hopin (also free). What is there to lose?

Wings Over Scotland pageviews, March 2020-Feb 2021.

No wonder only dogs can hear Pete Wishart’s screeching now.

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Well, this just got silly.

We’re absurdly touched by your response to the daft wee joke fundraiser we set up this week to raise £50 over a court case. We’re going to have to drink a LOT of fancy gin now. Thank you so much to everyone who donated, at a time when a lot of very good causes are also raising money. We’ll help some of them out from the proceeds.

We can’t help thinking, though, that at a very stressful time for the Yes movement a lot of people were just enjoying the chance to have a bit of much-needed fun. So allow us to offer our extra-special thanks to some unexpected benefactors.

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Alert readers from last night will notice that we’re currently running our first fundraiser since June 2019. It’s not one of our proper annual ones, in fact it’s basically just a joke at the expense of the Twitler Youth, but if anyone does want to kindly buy us a small treat of some sort it’ll be most appreciated. Click the pic to donate, if it would amuse you.

(The fundraiser is also to mark the one millionth reader comment on Wings. Jings.)

We’ll be back with some normal Scottish politics news shortly after noon, when we’re expecting to know the outcome of Martin Keatings’ court case over Section 30 powers. Should be a pretty interesting day.