Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish media this week has started to rather resemble Argentina under General Galtieri’s military junta – everywhere you look are the ghosts of the disappeared.

We’ve already documented at length the sudden non-existence of the Herald’s madly inaccurate front-page lead story from Monday (along with the corresponding piece in the Evening Times). And today two more things joined the missing list.

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Here’s Daniel Sanderson in the Times in January this year, complaining that too few university students come from poor backgrounds and therefore the SNP are bad:

So he’d be chuffed if that situation improved, right?

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We’re back in the archives again today, because there’s still no news. (The Herald is desperately trying to whip up outrage over trains arriving 61 seconds late, and David Torrance has finally turned up at the “OMG YES MOVEMENT SPLIT” party just as the last stragglers are heading home and the hosts are going to bed.)

And we’re particularly enjoying this one, for a whole list of reasons:

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In the continuing summer absence of any sort of Scottish politics news (the Sunday papers consist of Michelle Thomson understandably taking a swipe at the SNP in the Sunday Post, the Sunday Times spluttering in impotent fury that Michelle Thomson wasn’t prosecuted, and the Sunday Herald giving a glowing write-up to idiot Tory MSP Annie Wells while savaging sections of the Yes movement yet again – this time “older white men”), we thought you might enjoy a piece from the archives.

Discovered by an alert reader, this 1976 Times article features Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman discussing the seemingly-imminent prospect of Scottish devolution, to which he was implacably opposed and instrumental in defeating, ultimately leading to the collapse of a Labour government and the election of Mrs Thatcher.

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The Yes movement, like almost all movements, is plagued with a small but incredibly loud faction of intolerant, destructive extremists. Alert readers will have noticed that this site has again been the victim of them this week, but we’re not alone. They’ve also gone after two print publications – The National and iScot – over their “transgressions” against the beliefs of these self-appointed arbiters of what people are allowed to think.

What those two outlets and Wings have in common is achievement.

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Last month saw the first meeting between the UK Brexit delegation and the EU’s, and by many accounts it fell far short of the UK’s expectations. David Davis spent months drumming up the “strong and stable” approach which would see both the divorce deal and the subsequent post-Brexit trade deal negotiated simultaneously. He was told by everyone that this wouldn’t happen, but simply brushed off the warnings. When push came to shove, he finally accepted that he’d have to negotiate the divorce deal first.

This is just the latest in a long string of failures and ineptitudes over the course of the UK’s handling of the whole farcical process and it got me thinking. If Scotland had voted Yes in 2014, what would it have looked like if the Scottish Government had handled that vote the way the UK has managed Brexit?

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The complete series so far. If you’ve got a story like this to tell, or you know anyone who does, Phantom Power want to hear from you – drop them a line.

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I went to “Dunkirk” at the cinema today. If you want to know what it’s like, just watch this trailer 40 times in a row and save yourself the £12.

It’s a poor movie, disjointed and aimless and curiously lacking in tension or narrative given the real-life subject matter. (It’s remarkably short on dialogue, which is lucky because you can barely make out any of what little script or story there is from behind the endlessly howling one-note airhorn of the soundtrack. It’s a bit like someone filmed an IKEA assembly manual in live action during a Formula 1 race.)

But I couldn’t help thinking that part of the reason it was so unengaging was because it felt akin to watching a boxing match between two fighters you don’t like. If Mike Tyson took on Tyson Fury, would you cheer for the rapist or the anti-Semitic homophobe?

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We’ll be honest with you here, readers – even though it’s only July, when it comes to sheer ham-fisted, tin-eared, clown-shoed, foot-shooting idiocy we didn’t think anything in Scottish politics in 2017 could possibly top the SNP’s decision that the surefire way to win back voters after a poor election result was literally mutilating puppies.

After all, that’s the sort of thing you say as a self-evidently ludicrous and hyperbolic joke: “Ha ha, the SNP are so dominant in Scotland these days that the only way they could lose an election would be if Nicola Sturgeon went on telly and started hacking the tails off week-old puppy-dogs without anaesthetic! LOL!!!!!”

It couldn’t even be defended as a grotesque but cynically cunning attempt to win votes from the rural hunting-and-fishing lobby – they did it right AFTER the election, when all those people had just gone out and voted Tory anyway.

But bless their hearts, Scottish Labour never once saw a low bar that they didn’t try to slither under, and today they pulled off the seemingly impossible.

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