Wings Over Scotland

Archive for the ‘comment’

Opposition For Cowards 201

Posted on November 01, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

Just over three and a half years ago, we ran an article about how being an opposition MP or MSP is the cushiest gig in politics. You get all the pay, benefits, holidays and status, but you don’t have to actually do very much except whinge about how rubbish the government is, which most people are happy to do for free as a hobby.

Most of the time you don’t even need to turn up at your workplace.

(Sure, there are all your constituents to deal with, but if you’re not in power all that really amounts to is forwarding their letters to the government and demanding action.)

Tomorrow, the Holyrood opposition will give us a virtuoso demonstration.

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Category comment, football, scottish politics

The hungry gamekeepers 380

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

Old media and new media spoke with one voice in Scotland today:

But for once it was the dead-tree press that held the moral high ground.

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Tags: misinformation
Category comment, culture, football, scottish politics, stats

The results we’ve come to expect 176

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

Saturday 11.34am:

Saturday 8.02pm:

Wow, that’s fast. We can only assume she took John McTernan with her.

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Category comment, world

Trick or treat 186

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Chris Cairns

Tags: cartoons Chris Cairns hamish
Category comment, scottish politics, uk politics

A matter of competence 809

Posted on October 25, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

Back in May we wrote this:

The prediction duly came true, as most of ours do. Sometimes we hate being right.

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Tags: toldyouso
Category analysis, comment, scottish politics, video

The stupidest thing ever said 109

Posted on October 25, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

We realise that there’s some stiff competition for that accolade, even if you restrict it solely to things said by Kezia Dugdale, but this needs preserving for posterity.

A couple of questions do spring immediately to mind: (1) how does every country on Earth that isn’t Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland do it, and (2) given that Scotland has now been in the Union for 309 years, how much longer is it going to take before the two things are finally eradicated?

We look forward to hearing the answers from Labour any day now.

Category comment, idiots, scottish politics, wtf

A reminder of the obvious 138

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

From the annual report into the state of the UK, published by Deloitte:

It really is remarkable how often that has to be explained to stupid people.

Category comment, scottish politics, uk politics

All around the houses 271

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union has, it seems fair and uncontroversial to say, thrown Scotland’s Unionist parties into something of a spin. With all of them having campaigned for a Remain vote, all are now faced with the unsquareable circle of operating in a country that voted to stay in both the UK and the EU but can now only have one of those things.

Scottish Labour were the first to get themselves into a fankle, unsurprisingly. Their leader Kezia Dugdale first said she might conceivably be able to see herself voting for independence in order to stay in Europe, but then frantically backpedalled as soon as anyone noticed, and is now locked into a position of “never, no chance, not no way, not no how”, even as her own deputy publicly disagrees with her.

(Uncharitable readers pointing out that she took the same view on Jeremy Corbyn, before backing him wholeheartedly when he first won a leadership, then backing Owen Smith a year later on the grounds that Corbyn was useless, then insisting that Corbyn had her fulsome support and could definitely win a general election when he won the leadership again, should be ashamed of themselves. If a leader can’t U-turn three times in the space of 12 months, who can?)

But remarkably, the Scottish Tories seem to be even more confused.

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Category comment, scottish politics, uk politics

Who let the dogs out? 203

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

The popular children’s author and litigious bully JK Rowling, whose personal wealth is measured in hundreds of millions of pounds, has been devoting her time to the tricky task of finding people being rude on Twitter again.

In an attempt to prove that the independence referendum (described by the Scottish Police Federation as “robust but overwhelmingly good-natured”) had been every bit as grotesque as the Brexit one which has seen an enormous rise in serious hate crimes in England and Wales – comprising thousands of incidents up to and including murder – Rowling had cherry-picked out a few unpleasant-sounding social-media comments and compiled them into a series of delightful collages.

(We’ll leave aside that calling someone “Yoontermensch” is a fair distance removed from smashing them in the face with a plank of wood in the street, say. Though we will, as is traditional, remind readers that every single recorded instance of physical violence during the indyref came from the No side that Rowling lavishly funded.)

One of the comments (visible in the top-right corner of Rowling’s composite image) came from the Twitter account of this site. And we thought it sounded a bit off, so we had a quick check to see if we’d really said something so mean.

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Category comment, debunks, missing context, navel-gazing

The Simple Ruth 391

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

On the contentious and topical subject of what constitutes a mandate for a second independence referendum, we’re grateful to the super-alert reader who unearthed this clip from BBC Scotland’s election night coverage of 2011, in which Ruth Davidson gives a candid and blunt explanation of the criteria required: