Wings Over Scotland

As a lifelong political geek and former SNP and Alba Party member, I’ve spent years supporting Scotland’s independence movement. However, over the last few years, I’ve watched the campaign (as opposed to support for independence) wither away. Being a Scottish nationalist has become increasingly disheartening, like watching someone you love succumb to a slow, debilitating illness. In frustration, I switched off from my homeland and turned my focus to the drama of US politics.

Over the last three years I immersed myself in it, watching both left and right-wing outlets. I became so hooked and invested that I jumped on a plane to Washington DC for the 2024 election. I canvassed with DC Democrats in rural Pennsylvania (that’s me third from the left in the pic below), attended Kamala Harris’s concession rally, and went to Trump’s only watch party in DC.

My journey led me to believe that Scotland’s independence campaign could learn a great deal from Trump’s victory and the Democrats’ failure.

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So it looks like the USA has elected a mad orange rapist convicted of 34 felonies who could yet be in jail by the time of his inauguration. (He would remain President even if that happened, which would be really funny.) And we can’t even blame them for it, because the alternative they were offered was, remarkably and stupendously, worse.

Wings called it like we called Trump’s first victory (and most other things). We tweeted this last year when thinking about the upcoming election. It’s a variant on something we wrote about on Wings eight and a half years ago. We’re posting it again now in the desperate hope that one day, maybe, far in the future, someone will actually listen.

But, y’know, we’re not holding our breath or anything.

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From here, the top of the barrel is so far away that you can’t see so much as a pinprick of daylight through the most powerful pair of binoculars.

In a moving epitaph a few days ago, the widely-respected Professor James Mitchell of the University Of Glasgow noted of Alex Salmond that:

“He could be irascible and did not put up with fools […] He was impatient with lazy journalism […] and did not hide it. We can still see the consequences in some of the obituaries and commentary that reveal more about the writers than the subject”.

Mandy Rhodes of Holyrood magazine concurred, saying:

“In the clamour for commentators to vent their loathing, there have been too many sour column inches that have framed a man’s premature death around the egos of the journalists that have penned them.

Too great an appetite to rescue the words that were once filed and then spiked following a trial that didn’t give them the verdict they had prepared for. Too much haste to use his passing as the opportunity to seek revenge for a tongue-lashing or a put-down that they had never forgotten.”

And so, then, to Carlos Alba.

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Redaction is a tricky business, and comes with numerous pitfalls even if you’re being careful, which not everyone is. If you’re involved in creating a document you know will have to be redacted, there are a variety of safeguarding approaches you can adopt.

When I worked on a videogames magazine called Amiga Power in the 1990s, we ran a fun comedy feature about censorship. But because the company that published the magazine had had some unfortunate mishaps in the field, we took extra care by typing all the “offensive” words as random-length strings of Xs when we wrote the article.

And it was lucky that we did, because as you can see in the feature’s strapline, the art department misaligned the red redaction bar on some of them, and if there’d been a sweary in there it would have been easily identified.

Another way to go is to simply slap down some black ink and hope for the best.

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Everyone even remotely connected to Scottish politics has known for months that the below is the case. It’s an open secret.

But what’s playing out right now is something much bigger than the fate of one or two or three individuals. It’s the entire future of the credibility of Scotland’s justice system.

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Let us not be ungracious about the use of the term “leading figures” here.

But equally, let’s not waste too much attention.

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As we write this article, Sandy Brindley (on the left of the picture below) is still in post as the CEO of Rape Crisis Scotland.

For as long as that remains the case, rape victims in Scotland will not be safe.

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Don’t say we don’t tell you, readers.

Because we do tell you.

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This must be some kind of mistake.

Because we’re sure you’ve spent the last decade telling us that just couldn’t happen.

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Astonishingly, there isn’t a single word of apology anywhere in this statement.

There isn’t a scintilla of contrition, not the tiniest glimmer of admission of culpability or responsibility. There isn’t even a weasel-worded expression of “regret”.

Rape Crisis Scotland is unfit for purpose, and its CEO must resign.

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We’ve just watched the BBC’s new documentary, and we’re confused.

You can see both episodes on iPlayer now, or on TV tonight and tomorrow, but there’s no mistaking what’s being advertised – a personal drama between the two biggest players in Scottish politics in the last 300 years.

But that’s not what you get.

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The dogged persistence of alert Wings contributor Benjamin Harrop with regard to the Hamilton inquiry has been truly heroic, and today it has borne fruit in dramatic style.

The 10-page adjudication from the Scottish Information Commissioner that you can download by clicking that image is a somewhat labyrinthine (but fascinating) read, but the upshot of it is that the Commissioner has now ordered the Scottish Government to release all of the legal advice it was given with regard to its refusal to publish the written evidence submitted to James Hamilton for his inquiry into the events around the alleged conspiracy to falsely convict Alex Salmond of sexual assaults.

(See, even that one-sentence summary was quite hard going.)

But why does that matter and what does it mean?

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