Wings Over Scotland

Well, it’s been quite a week, readers. Over the course of the last seven days, Wings Over Scotland – and in particular myself, as its editor – has been subjected to an unprecedented series of smear attacks from several groups of alarmingly angry people, from “Better Together” activists (sometimes in unholy alliance with a small handful of confused, naive young SNP student sorts) to senior Scottish journalists, failed Tory election candidates, psychopathic stalkers and Rangers supporters.

I’ve personally been called – in the space of just that single week – homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, racist, disablist, ageist, fascist, sectarian, a rape apologist, anti-English, anti-Welsh and a hate-preaching bigot. All are entirely untrue, of course.

(Just about the only people I’m apparently NOT prejudiced against are left-handed unicycling vegan budgie-owners from Fermanagh. Which is doubly ironic, because I really loathe those smug, cack-fisted carrot-munchers.)

If you want to know why, look below.

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We’re just going through some reports from the top-secret “public meeting” of the No campaign in Glasgow today. Scores of empty seats (in a venue holding hundreds fewer than the packed-out Yes Glasgow launch), a fracas involving someone protesting about Trident, and the same tired old lines from the same tired old faces.

The pick of the bunch so far, though, came from Willie Rennie, who warned that “The Nationalists are right about the success of the parliament, but with independence devolution ends”. Yes, of course it does, you hapless balloon. Because when you arrive at your destination, you don’t need to travel any more.

If devolution is “a process, not an event”, then the only possible endpoint of that process is independence. Devolution is the return of more powers to the Scottish Parliament. When all powers are returned, of course there’s no more need for devolution. All the referendum represents is a shortcut – getting where we want to go in one leap without wrangling over the constitution non-stop for the next 40 years.

We can only imagine Willie Rennie burns his toast a lot.

We’d imagine, in fairness, that you need to be endowed with a pretty well-polished brass neck to stand as a Conservative politician in Scotland at all.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the sheer nerve of Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson yesterday as she gave a speech to an audience (if that’s not too strong a word in the circumstances) of “around 25” people in Edinburgh.

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Saturday is notionally our comedy day, but it’s nice to see the Scotsman joining in with the fun this week. We’re rapidly coming to the conclusion that the failing paper is now being operated as some sort of elaborate ironic prank, and the lead home-news story this morning does nothing to dispel that theory.

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Having spent the best part of two years shining an unforgivingly critical spotlight on the Scottish and UK media, we can have no complaints when we come under the same sort of scrutiny. So we didn’t mind a bit when the right-wing Spectator columnist (is there any other kind?) Alex Massie had something of a swing at us yesterday in a no-punches-pulled column entitled “The Closing of the Nationalist Mind”.

The theme of the piece was the beastly manner in which awful cybernats, typified by ourselves, refuse to even countenance the other side of the argument. Ooft!

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STV this morning reports a speech to be given today by Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, in which she issues some blood-curdling warnings about the chaotic impact of independence on Scottish trade with the UK.

There are a couple of things Ms Davidson should probably know.

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Alert readers will be aware of the occasional service provided by this site whereby we help out time-pressed citizens by letting them know when they can safely stop reading an article in the Scottish media. This morning we noticed a tweet from Unionist/Tory commentator Alex Massie, drawing attention to a Scotsman piece he described as “a v important column on banks. Not ‘Scaremongering'”.

Despite the obvious we respect Massie’s views on a lot of subjects, so we had a look.

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We’ve recently been documenting the No campaign’s increasingly-panicked attempts to avoid, or entirely shut down, the Scottish independence debate by various means.

We were on the sharp end of it again last night, as the usual small group of frothing extremist BritNats and psychopathic stalkers (accompanied this time by a tiny handful of “useful idiots” from the SNP’s youth wing) tried to smear and discredit this site by crudely misrepresenting things I’ve said in a personal capacity over a number of years.

But it’s not just us the anti-independence camp is trying to muzzle.

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This site has on several occasions praised the Daily Record for its sustained – and almost alone in the UK media – campaigning against the callous savagery of “Work Capability Assessments” carried out for the Department of Work and Pensions by the ironically-named Atos Healthcare, though we’ve also pointed out the Record’s curious reluctance to mention how Atos came to be in that position.

Today, though, mere economy with the truth has evolved into all-out lying.

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There’s a lot of cobblers talked about independence, so with only a limited number of hours in the day it’s important to know when you can safely stop reading something, because the person being quoted is clearly a clueless buffoon who’s forgotten to take the little green pills again and can be ignored without fear of missing anything.

In the case of the Herald’s lead story today, it’s four paragraphs in:

“He also warned the debate about self-government could lead to Orkney and Shetland, which are agitating for more powers, removing themselves and their oil wealth from Scotland.”

Yeah, thanks, Sir John Elvidge. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

With the official campaigns now over a year old, we can’t help wondering whether “Better Together Glasgow” shouldn’t have been launched before now.

But this is a funny sort of “public meeting”, isn’t it?

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Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.

But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.

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