Wings Over Scotland

Well, there it is.

It’s not like it hasn’t been coming.

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These are strange and grim times for the Scottish independence movement, but we never thought it’d ever get so strange that we’d be quoting Effie Deans.

Since pretty much day one, Wings has said that the only honest and honourable way to campaign against independence would be for Unionists to say Scotland isn’t a country, but a mere region of the UK. But they lack the courage to admit what their true beliefs are, and so they fall back on fear and lies disguised as concern, all cloaked in “proud Scot” protestations.

While that might be a miserable way to conduct yourself, it’s understandable, because the moment that you acknowledge Scotland as being a country, all the debating lines against independence crumble to ashes. They’re powerless in the face of the principle that countries should choose their own governments, for good or ill, because that’s what democracy is, and few people are willing to stand openly against democracy.

And what Effie Deans’ concession of this site’s cornerstone argument reveals is that Unionists finally feel safe against any threat of independence in the foreseeable future, and with good reason.

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So, we guess this is the “mainstream independence movement” now.

It’s smaller than we imagined.

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This is a Sunday Mail cover story today:

And it’s almost easy to dismiss it as meaningless. You can report to the police that aliens dug up your prize petunias and they’ll record it and give it a reference number and promise to investigate, before concluding that it was actually the neighbour’s cat.

But there’s one word in the 500-word piece that makes it much more interesting.

Can you spot it, readers?

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Humza Yousaf today:

So… his job is to get a legally binding referendum (something which doesn’t actually exist), but he knows that if we’re likely to win it we’re less likely to get it, so… we need to look like we’re going to lose one if it happens?

So presumably with support for the SNP already plummeting through the floor, the next phase of his grand strategy will be to drive support for independence down too? We suppose that’s a more rational explanation of the party’s actions in recent years than anything else we can think of, right enough.

Or of course, it might be that the guy’s just a complete gibbering idiot. You tell us.

Yesterday we took an extensive tour of all the red flags in the SNP’s 2022 accounts, which show a party in very deep financial trouble. But there was one part we left out because it deserves a post of its own.

The picture above – which was posted by then-CEO Peter Murrell during last year’s SNP conference – is a revealing one in all kinds of ways.

It starkly exposes how a party chose to hold an event for around 800 members in a venue with a capacity of 15,000 and then went to a lot of effort to disguise how empty the space was, rather than, for example, just hiring somewhere of an appropriate size (and cost) in the first place.

(Look how far into the hall the stage has been placed, leaving half the arena vacant, to then be hidden behind a giant screen and curtains and banners in order to give a false impression of how full it is.)

But what’s more symbolic is that there are almost no people in it.

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About sound and vision, we mean.

Three hundred and forty grand?

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We know the meanings of words are very flexible these days, especially in the SNP.

But this isn’t our understanding of the term “turning around”:

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Slacky The Holiday Boy is off for the next THREE weeks, gallivanting around the globe on the clearly excessive wages we’re paying him. We hope he does actually come back, because his home city is becoming a poisonously hostile place for the creative.

Around 300 years ago, Edinburgh was the birthplace and residence of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual and scientific accomplishment built around “the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason”, and which led to the city being famously dubbed “the Athens of the North”.

But those days are past now.

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Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.

Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.

But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.

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We’ve used this video before, but it’s extra-apt today.

Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.

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The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.

Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.

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