Wings Over Scotland

Humza Yousaf today:

So… his job is to get a legally binding referendum (something which doesn’t actually exist), but he knows that if we’re likely to win it we’re less likely to get it, so… we need to look like we’re going to lose one if it happens?

So presumably with support for the SNP already plummeting through the floor, the next phase of his grand strategy will be to drive support for independence down too? We suppose that’s a more rational explanation of the party’s actions in recent years than anything else we can think of, right enough.

Or of course, it might be that the guy’s just a complete gibbering idiot. You tell us.

Slacky The Holiday Boy is off for the next THREE weeks, gallivanting around the globe on the clearly excessive wages we’re paying him. We hope he does actually come back, because his home city is becoming a poisonously hostile place for the creative.

Around 300 years ago, Edinburgh was the birthplace and residence of the Scottish Enlightenment, a remarkable period of intellectual and scientific accomplishment built around “the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason”, and which led to the city being famously dubbed “the Athens of the North”.

But those days are past now.

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Fair play to The National, the use of the word “HIS” in this banner on their front page today might be the single funniest thing ever printed by a Scottish newspaper.

Because everyone and his dug in Scotland knows whose strategy it actually is, and how many years Pete Wishart spent traducing it as nonsense and furiously venting his overworked spleen at anyone who advocated it – right up to the point where Nicola Sturgeon adopted it in a desperate last attempt to keep the indy faithful pushing the SNP gravy bus, at which point it became the greatest masterplan of all time.

But today’s piece in the indy equivalent of the Daily Express (albeit with only a tenth of the sales) is so jawdropping that we doubt even Robert Oppenheimer would be up to the job of putting a scorchmark on Wishart’s brass neck, so let’s spend five minutes having a look at it before we go out for a bit of sunshine.

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We’ve used this video before, but it’s extra-apt today.

Humza Yousaf is played here by Morgan Freeman, the big plane carrying the bomb is the independence movement and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are in the chopper.

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The word “NEW” is working pretty hard there, lads.

Even quite alert Wings readers may not recall our brush with thoroughly obnoxious SNP councillor (and former chair of the misleadingly-named Aberdeen Independence Movement) Fatima Joji, because it happened such a long time ago.

But sometimes when someone behaves particularly egregiously in their professional role you have to at least give the proper grievance procedures a try (although it can prove very expensive to do so), and 13 months ago that’s what we did. We still have no idea how close we may be to the end of the process, but we have an update.

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Three weeks of summer left.

How’s it been for you?

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Look, we know. But there’s no news. Check out the state of it.

“KEYBOARD PLAYER ALLEGEDLY GOT FAT-SHAMED AT SOME UNSPECIFIED POINT IN TIME BY FOURTH-DIVISION BAND WHO LAST HAD A TOP 40 SINGLE IN 2006“ and “CYCLIST GOES TO TOILET”. Front pages.

(The keyboard player now works for SNP pie-disposal unit Anne McLaughlin, ironically, which seems to be the closest relationship the story has with current affairs. But hey, kudos to the Record for beating all the other papers to that “exclusive”.)

We remain alert. If anything remotely worthwhile happens, we’ll be on it.

The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.

Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.

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There was an independence rally in Ayr today. They got a fairly nice sunny day for it. But in the supposed “summer of independence”, the self-proclaimed “First Activist” wasn’t there. That’s because he was here instead.

As far as we’re aware, LGBT Youth Scotland remains under police investigation for the suspected grooming and sexual exploitation of children. It’s impossible to imagine any other sort of organisation that could still expect to enjoy the patronage of a First Minister under such circumstances – especially when there were obvious other places he could be reasonably expected to show his face – but that’s how the SNP’s priorities roll in 2023 and there’s no getting away from it.

For any question to do with independence, folks, Humza Yousaf is not the answer.