Because sometimes you just can’t even.
Let’s all take a moment and imagine Labour stepping up to that situation, shall we?
We’ve had extremely poor internet at Wings HQ since Thursday of last week, which our telecoms company is trying to get to the bottom of. (We’re typing this on an iPhone via very flaky 4G.)
We’ll be back with you ASAP. In the meantime, we’re being baffled by this assertion from the Financial Times that’s been doing the social-media rounds again recently.
Um, that isn’t “difficult” at all. That’s what maritime borders are for. That’s why the UK took the precaution of stealing (or reclaiming, depending on where you’re looking at it from) thousands of square miles of Scottish waters in 1999.
But other than any possible attempts to renegotiate that boundary, there’s nothing to debate. One side of the line is ours. The other side is yours. The end. We’re not at all sure why the FT would ever try to pretend otherwise.
Since we’re talking about sectarianism and bigotry this week, we’ve got you a 1998 Scotsman piece on the subject. The full piece is below, but our favourite lines come from Scotland In Union stalwart and noted Twitter zoomer “Professor” Tom Gallagher.
Wow. And the Ku Klux Klan’s distinctiveness stems from their white identity, we guess, although perhaps they have misgivings about some aspects of lynching black people and setting fire to crosses on their lawns.
We’re a bit annoyed about this, because we were going to give the Absolute Fanny Of The Week award to Anas Sarwar every week as a joke, but now it seems we can’t.
So that’s a professional journalist who’s studied the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, or OBFA, so intently and diligently that he keeps calling it “OBAF” instead. But that’s not the stupidest of it.
(In case you missed this particular twist.)
Call us cynical if you will, but we were very suspicious when we saw today’s Herald.
We were a little bit surprised that Oxfam would have commissioned a report into Scotland, so we thought we better check and see exactly what it said.
We’ve got a shock result for the inaugural winner of this exciting new award, readers. Remarkably it’s NOT David Torrance – who wrote an arch review of a chapter of a book about Donald Trump that didn’t actually exist. Good effort, Davey, but no cigar.
And it’s not even notorious Lib Dem atom-wit Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP, who bleated to Ofcom when an SNP party political broadcast unrelatedly took the mickey out of a character who may (or may not) have been the selfsame Torrance.
No, the first ever Wings Absolute Fanny Of The Week is… Anas Sarwar!
In common with half of Scottish Labour, Sarwar has been raging at Paisley MP Mhairi Black for her “silence” over the closure of a 16-bed children’s ward in the town, which has been replaced by an entire new state-of-the-art 256-bed children’s hospital 10 minutes down the road, right next to the sparkly new Southern General.
But only Sarwar did it by enclosing a picture of the local paper’s front-page splash on the story. In which there was one teeny-weeny slight problem for him.
Remarkably, the notoriously unreliable and yet somehow omnipresent Scottish political commentator and reality-disputer David “Davey” Torrance was still digging last night in the wake of this story from three days ago.
Never, eh? Let’s see if that’s true, shall we?
The past week saw the return to the public eye of the former Independent columnist Johann Hari, who vanished in disgrace a few years ago in a plagiarism scandal over claiming to have done things that he hadn’t.
It also saw the return of ubiquitous Scottish politics scribe David Torrance from a trip to San Francisco, the details of which he shared at stultifying length with the unfortunate readers of The Scottish Review.
Or at least, what he SAID were the details of where he SAID he’d been.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
