Wings Over Scotland

Good news:

Read the rest of this entry →

One of the compensations of living in England (from the perspective of editing a website about Scottish politics) is that you get a much clearer picture of how English people – who make up 85% of the UK electorate, and as such in practice determine who the government is – see the country’s political leaders.

For those of you who don’t, here’s Charlie Brooker – a man who’s no fan of the Tories by any stretch of the imagination – casting a weary and exasperated eye over Ed “these strikes are wrong” Miliband on last night’s Weekly Wipe.

In our experience it’s a pretty accurate snapshot of how the hapless Labour leader is regarded by most left-leaning people down on this side of the border. You’ll need to have seen the rest of the episode to get the “Schofield!” joke.

There’s a very strange article on the front page of the Herald website this morning. It’s an interview with Nigel Farage in which the UKIP leader insists that his party, not the SNP, will hold the balance of power in the UK parliament after May’s election.

It’s a bold assertion given that current projections put the SNP on anywhere from 30 to 56 seats with UKIP expected to struggle to get 5 to 10. But Farage’s rationale for the statement is an interesting one.

Read the rest of this entry →

The abusive Facebook comments recently directed at Labour MP Margaret Curran and highlighted in a piece on the STV website today make us sigh. Not only are they horrible but they’re counter-productive, in every sense of the term – they’re not going to change Curran’s mind about anything by yelling at her, and they feed a narrative about “vile cybernats” that the media is all too eager to gleefully perpetuate.

So let’s make something clear from the off: shut up, idiots. You’re not helping.

But then let’s tell the rest of the story.

Read the rest of this entry →

There really isn’t very much of a news story in this morning’s Sun “exclusive” that some Labour MPs say they’d quit the party rather than work with the SNP should the electorate deliver such a result in May. One told the paper:

“I would quit the party — there’s no way I would sit alongside them.

We’ve just spent three years knocking lumps out of each other in the independence referendum, how could we then share power?”

Those of us who remember the parade of furious Scottish Labour figures going on TV and openly threatening to scupper any “rainbow coalition” involving the Nats in 2010, thereby ensuring that David Cameron and George Osborne came to power, won’t be the least bit surprised at the sheer depth of hatred and jealous rage that consumes Labour’s branch office in North Britain when the SNP are mentioned.

And there’s nothing eyebrow-raisingly new in Scottish Labour’s spiteful determination that if Scots vote against the Conservatives – but not for Labour – they should be punished with Tory governments. It’s the standard policy of electoral blackmail that the party has deployed against the rise of rivals from the left for years, and which it’s now also turning against the Greens south of the border.

But there is a telling phrase in that short quote.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s somehow fitting that the lead article on Labour Hame today is headed by a lie before it even starts – an offer to join the party for £1 that takes you to a page where it actually costs five times as much.

(We’d noticed days ago that the much-hyped £1 offer had been quietly dumped after just a month, but it appears that nobody in the Scottish branch office thought to keep poor hapless Labour Hame in the loop.)

The article below, though, is remarkably even more dishonest.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Telegraph, 13 September 2014:

“Scotland heading for a ‘Great Depression’ after a Yes vote

A study by Deutsche Bank said a Yes vote for Scottish independence would ‘go down in history as a political and economic mistake’ on a par with Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the Gold Standard or the failures by the Federal Reserve in America that triggered the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It warned that Scotland risked a similar depression if voters backed the Yes campaign on Thursday, and described the desire for independence as an ‘incomprehensible’ one which could have negative consequences ‘far beyond’ what people had imagined.

Gordon Brown said the Deutsche Bank report showed that Scotland was ‘in danger of falling through an economic trapdoor’.”

We can only assume something pretty amazing must have happened since then.

Read the rest of this entry →

It gets clearer with every passing day that Scottish Labour’s chief election strategy is to assume that Scottish voters are goldfish. There’s no other explanation for a piece in yesterday’s Courier on the SNP’s Jamie Hepburn’s call for the implementation of a 2009 report into which sporting events should be protected from pay-TV broadcasters.

The article concluded with some comments from Labour.

“It was reported last month that Labour will include a commitment in its general election manifesto to ensure major sporting such as the Open Championship are shown on terrestrial TV.

Scottish leader Jim Murphy told the Scotland and Sunday events like the Open and international football “shouldn’t be a minority sport for only those who can afford satellite television subscriptions”.

A party spokesman said today: “We’re happy to send the SNP Government links to all the announcements Jim Murphy and Kez Dugdale have made so that it is easier for them to adopt our policies.”

Which is, y’know, bold.

Read the rest of this entry →

Still confused about the difference between an “oil fund” and a “resilience fund”, folks?

So were we, but no longer. We’ve had a breakthrough.

Read the rest of this entry →

Posted this morning, after a week in which it was so comprehensively proven to be a complete lie that even Torcuil Crichton of the Daily Record was forced to concede it.

You almost have to grudgingly admire the sheer bull-headed tenacity of their dogged determination to prove once and for all to the people of Scotland that Labour think they’re dribbling gullible morons.

Read the rest of this entry →

So, an experiment. Here on Wings we don’t tend to deal very much in specific political issues, other than independence. We’re not aligned to any party, and our primary goal is to see Scotland become a national democracy in which all voices can be heard. We happen to be on the left of the political spectrum, but that’s neither here nor there while Scotland’s politics are at the mercy of the whims of voters elsewhere.

But just for a change of pace at the weekends, when there tends not to be much happening, we thought we might try having a space where broader ideas can be debated outwith the framework of the constitutional debate or party politics. If there’s something you’d like to talk about in front of a sizeable audience, drop us a line.

To give you an idea of what we mean, we’re going to start off by outlining a personal pet idea we’ve had for years, and which is an attempt to tackle one of Scotland’s most toxic problems – alcohol abuse. It’s a simple concept, it’s cheap to implement, it doesn’t punish the innocent and it seems like it’d work. See what you think.

Read the rest of this entry →

A quick rhetorical question, readers: if, as Labour endlessly claim, the Tories want the SNP to win seats in Scotland in order to stop Ed Miliband being PM, why are most of the Scottish columnists in the right-wing press calling on Scots to vote Labour?

Read the rest of this entry →