Wings Over Scotland

Take a bow, Angela Haggerty of the Sunday Herald:

Read the rest of this entry →

Following the Scottish media’s week-long frenzy of stories about the “scandal” of baby boxes – in which it was revealed to the astonishment of the nation that cardboard is flammable and incapable of stopping an armoured assault from a tank division or a zombie plague – we were a little startled to note that the Guardian (which has now run THREE stories about how terrible it is to give babies nice free stuff) didn’t always have such a downer on the project.

Apparently (and as recently as this February) baby boxes are “great innovations” and “hugely popular” – so long as the SNP aren’t involved, of course, at which point they turn into grotesque deathtraps.

And it got us wondering: what else is only terrible when it happens in Scotland?

Read the rest of this entry →

We must admit, we didn’t think this would be beaten so soon.

But there you go. Just goes to show you how little we know about the sick, despicable, sewer-dredging shitfestival that is the Scottish media, and how badly even we’ve been overestimating their humanity all these years.

“Scandal”.

It says “scandal”.

To hell with every last one of these worthless sacks of parasitic filth. And their horses.

The Scottish Sunday Express yesterday had a shock-horror exposé about a “HUGE loophole” in the Scottish Government’s minimum-pricing legislation for alcohol.

We thought we’d give it a quick once-over. You’re in for a HUGE shock, readers.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s not easy to type with your jaw on the floor, readers.

But in the six and a half years we’ve been watching the Scottish media here on Wings, this surely has to be an all-time low.

Read the rest of this entry →

Today’s Daily Record runs with a bizarre story lifted from yesterday’s Guardian, which resurrected the media’s longstanding but latterly-dormant hate campaign against the Scottish Government’s popular “baby box” initiative.

Universal free baby boxes have been used in Finland for the past 69 years with no negative consequences, and have indeed coincided with an absolutely enormous reduction in child mortality there. They’re being increasingly adopted all over the world, and are also sold commercially in the UK for up to £450.

Uniquely, however, in Scotland they’re bad.

Read the rest of this entry →

Sane people across the nation have watched in growing disbelief for the last two years as the UK government’s catastroshambles over Brexit has unfolded. In the latest jaw-dropping developments, David Davis has revealed that he’s only just now thinking of STARTING negotiating a trade deal with the EU – 22 months after the referendum and with absolutely no idea of how to solve the Irish Question on which it all depends.

Meanwhile, Faisal Islam of Sky News has made the pertinent point that the one “land-based” border between the UK and mainland Europe, the Channel Tunnel, has no infrastructure in place for serving as a checkpoint because it was fundamentally never designed or envisaged for a Europe without the UK, and the UK government has done absolutely nothing in the last two years to prepare for that changing.

And the more ludicrously chaotically and ineptly the whole farce plays out, the more it’s only possible to come to one rational conclusion about it: that the Prime Minister’s grand plan for enacting Brexit is to fail.

Read the rest of this entry →

So everyone’s fighting about Gaelic again. Provoked by a minor story about a Gaelic dictionary MSM and alt-media pundits are flying at each other with daggers over a language spoken by almost nobody on Earth and on which the government spends a few measly and irrelevant pennies, trying to turn it into a proxy war over politics and the constitution and fascism and genocide and goodness knows what else.

We’ve covered the political nonsense around the issue numerous times on this site, and we’re not about to do so again here. This, as befits the Soapbox section, is a purely personal view, which will doubtless attract more furious shrieking from the sort of people who long ago lost the ability to listen to a counterpoint – or indeed tolerate the mere concept of one – let alone consider it or debate it without abuse.

But hey ho. After a while you just learn to tune that stuff out, so let’s go.

Read the rest of this entry →

Holiday Boy is taking slacking to a new extreme to mark the onset of spring, and we’re sad to inform you that there’ll be no Cairnstoons on Wings for another couple of weeks while our intermittent satirist rearranges his Fabergé eggs or something.

Entirely by coincidence, yesterday we were doing some overdue admin, and as we filed away some previous bits of crayon-work we couldn’t help but be struck by the prescience of a few cartoons from various times, 2013 in particular.

So just in case anyone had forgotten (attention spans are short these days), here’s some of the insight we’re all currently missing.

Read the rest of this entry →

We weren’t going to do anything on yesterday’s disturbing development in the legal wrangle between the Scottish and UK governments over devolved powers and Brexit, because the rest of the media has been covering it at length and we don’t have any particular expertise or insight to offer.

But it was hard to ignore the striking turn of phrase used, not by some sensationalist partisan commentator but by the learned and sober QC Jonathan Mitchell, last seen acting for the petitioners in the Alistair Carmichael lie case.

It doesn’t pull any punches, but as a summary of the relationship London wants to put in place between itself and the devolved nations for years to come (Labour-run Wales has already caved), and which Unionist politicians and the more witless pundits are of course portraying as unreasonable grievance-mongering and failure on the part of the Scottish Government, it’s about as accurate a description as you’re ever going to find.

A beginner’s guide to how it works:

SUNDAY: The Sunday Times copies an SNP BAD nonsense story wholesale from the previous day’s Scottish Daily Mail.

Read the rest of this entry →

Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

Read the rest of this entry →