Wings Over Scotland

The media is aflame this morning with discussion of the agreement between the UK and EU with particular regard to Ireland, in which the UK essentially concedes just about everything including free movement, the thing most Brexiters voted Leave for.

We’ve largely avoided analysis of the Brexit negotiations here on Wings up until now, because there’s been a raft of people who are far more expert on the subject than us doing it at enormous length, very little of it directly concerned Scotland, and so nobody really needed our tuppence-worth. But this one’s big.

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Yesterday at Holyrood the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in the name of Orkney MSP Liam McArthur, brought forward a motion of no confidence in Police Scotland, which was calmly but stingingly rebutted by Scottish Police Federation chair Calum Steele on Twitter. A debate went ahead in the chamber, of which the outcome was the below:

So the Lib Dems lost, Labour lost, the Greens lost, the Tories lost and the SNP lost. We’re glad that’s all cleared up and was a valuable use of everyone’s time, then.

What’s even the point any more?

Even if you don’t buy into any of the persistent health concerns about aspartame, there are already TWO chemically-sweetened Irn Bru brands (Sugar-Free and Xtra) for the people who can stomach the foul taste of fake sugar. But now nobody will be able to choose a version without it.

Alongside whisky, Irn-Bru is arguably THE iconic branded product of Scotland but now 120 years of history have just been casually crapped on and thrown aside in the name of the nanny state and corporate greed (aspartame is dirt-cheap compared to sugar, and Barr – having ruined Tizer, Red Kola and its other drinks the same way years ago – also wants to avoid the UK government’s sugar tax taking a bite out of its profits).

Let’s just shut down Holyrood, rebrand as North Britain and be done with it.

(It’s nearly Christmas! Buy a cuddly Hamish The Lion toy here! Plus maybe some cartoon books.)

God bless ’em, they just never lose the faith, do they?

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(It’s nearly Christmas! Buy a cuddly Hamish The Lion toy here! Plus maybe some cartoon books.)
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Back in the summer we sang the praises of one of Scotland’s tiny semi-handful of pro-independence print organs, the splendid iScot. So it seems only fair that we should offer the same courtesy to the other one we mentioned at the time, The National. It’s three years old today – how the time’s flown – and its editor Callum Baird wants your support. Over to him.

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Yesterday’s edition of the Scottish Mail On Sunday devoted most of a page to a weird column from Ruth Davidson (in which she appeared to believe that Alex Salmond was still the First Minister), crowing about the great deal that Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs have supposedly won for Scotland in this week’s coming budget.

The first alleged fruits of the deal were revealed today.

That tweet is quite disturbing in itself, because what it unmistakeably implies is that if Scotland had voted for more SNP MPs in June and fewer Tories, the UK government would have retaliated by spitefully punishing innocent war veterans.

And Poppy Scotland weren’t too pleased about being weaponised either.

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This is Spectator columnist Alex Massie reacting earlier this week to the news of Alex Salmond doing a show for Russian news channel RT.

Alex Salmond is these days a private individual with no responsibilities to anyone, and RT is a legal, Ofcom-licenced UK broadcaster whose output is beamed free into every home in the land.

The first episode of The Alex Salmond Show featured guests from both Labour and the Tories, opened with lengthy discussion and advocation of women’s and LGBT rights, followed by a 15-minute interview with deposed Catalan president Carles Puigdemont – something which has proven beyond the capabilities of mainstream UK news outlets despite the remarkable events currently engulfing an EU member state.

(BBC Scotland, we should perhaps note at this point, does not currently carry a single dedicated political TV show from a Scottish perspective at all and hasn’t done for more than a year.)

Massie used some slightly more measured language when it came to writing about the show in the Spectator, merely describing Salmond as an “idiot”, a “fool”, a “chump”, “pitiful”, “embarrassing” and “disgraceful”. But when it came to another former Scottish party leader, he was for some reason in a rather more forgiving mood.

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Since David Torrance shows no sign of being willing to retract the falsehood below that he tweeted earlier today despite our requests, we’ll have to address it here. Apologies for the indulgence.

We can find nowhere that we made any allegation of Torrance being “paid” by RT. We tweeted that he’d “worked for” them, and said he’d “simply appeared on” the channel. Neither of those statements claims that any money changed hands. If Torrance says that he worked for RT for nothing purely in order to get some free publicity for his book, we’re happy to accept that at face value.

(Although we’re not sure if that makes it better or worse, to be honest.)

But that’s not really the point of all the outrage over “The Alex Salmond Show”, is it?

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Yesterday’s Daily Record (which would increasingly be an accurate three-word name for the paper) ran an innocuous piece of page-filler fluff rubbish, and for once we’re not talking about a David Torrance column.

It featured the “psychic” predictions of a man who, the Record told us – no fewer than FIVE times in the opening few lines – previously predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, and who had a track record of “incredible accuracy”.

Sounds pretty spooky. Maybe he’s got the gift.

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