Wings Over Scotland

There’s a fascinating piece in the Guardian this morning.

It reveals that in attempting to solve the unsolvable Irish border problem, the EU’s Brexit negotiators are – at the UK’s behest – trying to come up with a plan which would preclude its use for Scotland in the event of independence.

That’s an entirely legitimate course of action. Having lacked the courage to establish itself as a nation, Scotland shouldn’t expect to be treated as one by either the EU or the UK (which has demonstrated its contempt by flatly refusing Scotland any voice in negotiations). The EU is quite properly, and admirably stoutly, defending the interests of its member state, Ireland. Would that Scotland had such clout.

But it’s worth taking a second to ponder what it all means.

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As certain elements of the Yes movement do their best (yet again) to foment some sort of civil war over a popular 1990s movie for no better reason than to draw a little bit of attention to themselves in the face of rapidly-plummetting readership and influence, we found ourselves instead pondering a different Scottish historical battle today.

We’ll leave it at that.

Readers may have noted a fairly concerted attempt over the last 18 months or so by the opponents of Scottish independence to get Wings Over Scotland shut down. But sometimes the greatest danger comes from the people you least suspect.

Because the thing SNP MP Pete Wishart is lauding in that tweet earlier today, and has been agitating for for months, would, without a shadow of a doubt, kill this website and scores of others like it overnight.

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The Scottish Daily Mail fished this story out of the news toilet today:

So “man with major and important job gets paid the same rate for a full day’s work as Britain’s 800+ Lords and Ladies do for signing in for five minutes and then going home“ is apparently a shock-horror scoop now. But it gets better.

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There’s not much going on in Scottish politics at the moment, but you know that when the media resorts to printing stuff from echo-skulled Tory mousewit Annie Wells, there can’t even have been any barrel left to scrape.

Grimly, the spelling in the headline is the LEAST embarrassing facet of the story.

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Kenny McBride is a Wings reader. This is his personal experience and view. 

A couple of weeks ago Ian Small, BBC Scotland’s Head of Public Policy, wrote an article for the Scotsman addressing the question of anti-independence bias at Pacific Quay. Naturally he defended the Corporation strongly, but he also made what seemed like an invitation:

“The issue over BBC content being posted online brought a further consequence, with over 200 people turning up at Pacific Quay in Glasgow last week to demonstrate against BBC bias. We offered to talk. That offer still stands. We want to engage, constructively, in dialogue with those who question our journalism or are suspicious of our decision-making.”

I was sceptical, of course, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I decided to act.

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Chris McEleny is an SNP councillor. This is a personal opinion.

The open sewer of some newspapers has been in full torrent this week. However it surged over the overflow pipe with the hysteria in last weekend’s Sunday Mail.

In a deranged editorial it actually argued that Alex Salmond should stay out of the SNP “whatever happens with his legal challenge and the subsequent police investigation”.

In other words, “regardless of innocence or guilt, regardless of whether the procedures are judged just or unjust we just don’t like him”.

Actually it’s not what they like or don’t like. It’s fear that motivates much of the mainstream media against Salmond.

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There’s a very weird story in the Scotsman today.

As alert readers will have noticed from the third paragraph, the headline is actually an inexplicably negative spin on the fact that journeys on the line INCREASED last year by 5.8% to a new record high of 1.5 million.

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It’s been a tough few days for the Daily Record. So maybe we should forgive this:

Let’s just enjoy those pie charts for a moment.

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It’s an almost impossible task to identify the most despicable sewer-dredging piece of “journalism” that the Scottish press has spewed out in the past 10 days or so of demented obsession with as-yet-unsubstantiated allegations by two unnamed women against Alex Salmond, but today’s Sunday Mail must be a strong contender.

The paper runs a four-page orgy of hypocritical moralistic shrieking based on Salmond’s outrageous and unacceptable behaviour in, um, thanking the people who donated to his crowdfunder to challenge the process by which the story was improperly leaked to the media. The monster.

And if you think that’s a ludicrously thin basis on which to create a front-page splash and three pages of screaming drivel inside, wait until you actually see some of it.

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Last night’s unexpected events caused a meltdown in the Unionist community on a scale we can’t remember seeing before. Alex Salmond doing the exact thing they’d all been calling on him to do for days provoked an absolute apocalypse of spluttering, incandescent fury in which more people made idiots of themselves at once than the last time “Rangers” had a share issue.

One man, of course, led from the front.

Ouch.

As we write this, Salmond’s fundraiser stands at £70,266 in a little under 14 hours. That’s a significant sum, especially considering every penny was donated freely and voluntarily, but it’s still only a small fraction of the million or so pounds Murdo Fraser has extorted out of unwilling taxpayers in two decades of being an MSP despite having lost every single election he’s ever stood in.

Fraser, though, wasn’t short of fellows in fuddery.

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