Wings Over Scotland

In the end the four-hour session ran for almost exactly six hours, and Alex Salmond looked like he could have done another six standing on his head. Now, it would be only fair to acknowledge that this site was on his side before the start, but by any rational objective assessment the former First Minister delivered the performance of his life.

(We use “performance” there in the Lionel Messi sense, not the Laurence Olivier one.)

The contrast with every other witness who’s appeared before the committee was night and day. With Salmond there was no evasion, no hesitation, no forgetting, no “I’ll get back to you on that in writing”. (We recommend the Twitter feed of Scotland Speaks for some choice clips.)

Every question was answered fully, directly, fluently and immediately, without recourse to notes, and the content was never less than devastating from his opening statement to the final surprise bombshell. We were exhausted just watching it.

His words, tone and body language all absolutely radiated candour, solemnity and honesty. When the SNP members tried to trip him up on some arcane point or other, he was on them like an extremely calm hawk, methodically tearing their assertions to ribbons with the correct fact or quote at his fingertips, and ice in his veins.

Salmond came across like a man who’d been planning this day for almost a year and wasn’t going to mess it up. And he didn’t. Heavens, how he didn’t.

Read the rest of this entry →

Readers, we swear to you we are not making this up. What you’re about to read are genuine extracts from the SNP’s official new (probably illegal) Equalities Mechanism explanatory note, detailing what does and doesn’t count as a disability when it comes to jumping the queue for a regional list nomination.

And straight away it’s a real punch in the gut for firestarters, muggers, rapists, flashers and, in most cases, hay-fever sufferers. THIS BIGOTRY WILL NOT STAND.

Read the rest of this entry →

We must admit, the terrible people that we are, we’ve been enjoying watching today’s extended meltdown by the SNP’s woke faction about last night’s NEC election results. Because it appears their egos are so huge that they’re not even smart enough to play dignified to spoil our schadenfreudish fun. It’s been full-on public tantrums.

But this nonsense needs briefly addressing.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve just been out for our evening constitutional in the relatively cool night air (Bath sweltered at an oppressive 30C today and Bear Patrol was pretty gruelling), and we thought readers might be interested in what we saw.

The city has observed lockdown with great diligence, as we’ve previously documented, and to be honest we’re not sufficiently familiar with the latest rules to say it wasn’t still doing so tonight. But a nearby park, around 9.30pm, was a disconcerting scene.

Read the rest of this entry →

On the 1st of January, Chinese authorities took the decision to close the Wuhan food market. The following day, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, were confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus) which we now know as COVID-19.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a New Year message, from the private island of Mustique in the Caribbean, that the “first item” on his agenda remained his commitment to take Britain out of the EU by the end of January.

Within weeks the virus had spread across the world to many countries including Italy, Germany, Australia, the USA and of course the UK.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s pretty interesting that today marks the first really tangible diversification between the Scottish and UK governments with regard to the coronavirus crisis: the Holyrood administration has rejected Westminster’s much-criticised new main slogan and will be sticking with the old “STAY HOME” message.

(Here at Wings we’re mainly upset that the extremely misguided new campaign will undermine our years-old pro-alertness position.)

Because what our latest Panelbase poll showed is that there’s a huge gulf between perception and reality in Scotland when it comes to virus strategy.

Read the rest of this entry →

Yeah, we know we said we weren’t going to say anything else about the COVID-19 crisis, but sometimes there’s just too much stupid going around to stay silent.

A disturbing number of people appear to have interpreted the undoubted seriousness of the pandemic to mean that nobody is ever allowed to be even slightly happy for the briefest of moments until it’s all over.

As a result, while half the country is full of people just trying to cope as best they can while acting sensibly and responsibly within both the letter and spirit of the emergency restrictions, the other half has elected itself officers of the Lockdown Gestapo, pointing fingers and shrieking at anyone deemed not to be miserable enough.

Please, please, can we stop doing that, folks?

Read the rest of this entry →