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”:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Allow us to present Exhibit C, if you know what we’re saying.
Won’t someone rid them of this turbulent priest once and for all?
Wings readers are of course the last people in the country who need any reminding of what a ditch-slithering creature Scottish Labour activist Duncan Hothersall is. And in truth by his standards these tweets are only about averagely despicable.
But it’s what they don’t say that’s notable.
Even not-very-alert readers will have noticed that we’re taking a little summer holiday in the complete absence of any political events. Rest assured that we’re using the time to patrol Bath diligently for bears. But we couldn’t help noticing this on Twitter today.
Someone tweeted it to show that as late as summer 2020 the SNP was still soliciting money for what it called its “ring fenced Independence Referendum Campaign Fund”.
There’s not much to be cheerful about in Scottish politics at the moment, so let’s take a moment to be uncharacteristically positive about the future.
Because you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at this.
Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella.
And not just for the obvious reason.
As a corollary to this piece from earlier today, here’s a nice simple picture.
Alert readers will already have spotted the problem with it.
This is, strictly speaking, semantically, true:
It is, however, as the famous phrase goes, not the whole truth.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
