Wings Over Scotland

Iain Banks blew my mind. I read The Wasp Factory as a teenager when it came out in 1984, and I’d simply never encountered anything like it. I devoured it in an afternoon.

Until then my library had consisted pretty much solely of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books – brilliant and funny and quietly profound, but essentially lightweight stuff. The most “adult” literature I’d tackled was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an agonisingly painful experience that took nearly six months of teeth-gritted determination to plough through, one hideous chapter at a time, waiting for a promised epiphany of knowledge and understanding that never arrived. It single-handedly gave me a dislike of hippies that endures to this day.

The Wasp Factory was a revelation. Dark, disturbing, but funny and ultimately uplifting, it was at once both palpably Scottish and nationless. I hovered outside bookshops waiting for Banks’ subsequent releases – Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Espedair Street. Every one was utterly different from the last, united only by the warm, optimistic spirit of humanity underpinning them. I’m a natural misanthrope, but every time I read one of Iain Banks’ novels I’m turned away from despair towards hope again.

I made sure I took them with me when I left home, and they sit in my bookshelf still, growing more well-thumbed with the years. And when Banks moved into science-fiction, I came along for the ride. His undramatic, matter-of-fact depiction of an enlightened “post-scarcity” galactic Utopia – the Culture – was beautiful and politically thrilling, and as a young videogame obsessive the author’s clear connection with and understanding of the alternative worlds offered by games reached out to me in an incredibly direct and personal way that Douglas Adams’ work hadn’t.

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It’s just been brought to our attention by an alert reader that we’ve been shamefully failing in the months since the signing of the Edinburgh Agreement to give credit where it’s due to Scotland’s champion in Westminster, the Rt. Hon. Michael Moore:

“Stephen [Williams, Lib Dem MP] is clearly a strong liberal voice for young people. We should be helping him build an unstoppable momentum for permanent change following the Independence Referendum next year, where another Liberal Democrat, Michael Moore, has secured the right of 16 and 17 year olds to vote.“

What with that and Jenny Marra MSP apparently being single-handedly responsible for the ending of the split-tickets fiasco on ScotRail (1hr 41m), it looks like we owe all the Unionist parties a big vote of thanks today. Our gratitude is literally unmeasurable.

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As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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So we weren’t sure what to do about our 1000th post. We toyed with the idea of making it a throwaway two-liner just for fun. We thought about a grand mission statement, but, y’know, it’s pretty obvious what our mission is so there didn’t seem much point. We considered a sort of “Greatest Hits” thing, but we basically did that last month. We were fairly sure we wanted a cartoon, though.

In the end, we decided there’d been enough navel-gazing already in the last month, and that it might be best just to make a quick point and then get back to work.

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When you involve yourself in politics, the surest sign that you’ve got your opponents rattled isn’t that they start to copy you. It’s when they start to smear you.

Last night, an unholy alliance of prominent Labour and Tory activists (and some plain old-fashioned internet nutters) embarked on an extraordinary, co-ordinated and prolonged attack on Wings Over Scotland. We were accused of being liars, “needle-dicked fascists”, Nazis, misogynists, “sub-tabloid trutherists” (whatever the hell those are), “second-wave feminists” (ditto), “online vigilantes”, sectarian bigots (not sure on which side), “hate preachers” and probably of leaving the toilet seat up – it was hard to keep up with the sheer volume of abuse.

There were petty slurs on our professional standing and on where we live. We were, with no small measure of irony, accused of deploying “vicious personal invective”. It was the full kitchen sink of ad-hominem, as a frightened, panicky opponent threw everything they could think of in our direction.

We won’t delve any further into the details. The material outcome was the biggest influx of new Twitter followers in several weeks and a number of belated donations to our fundraising campaign, so that was nice. But what on Earth could have provoked such a poisonous and sustained onslaught?

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We like to jest at some of the more hysterical and ridiculous scare stories put out by Unionists about independence, but sometimes the joke just isn’t funny any more.

This week we listened to the “For A’That” podcast, which featured a range of bloggers including the pro-indy Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell and the rare beast that is a right-wing Green, in the form of new member and Liberal Democrat defector Douglas McLellan, once seen many moons ago around these here parts.

The last guest was ultra-loyal Lib Dem activist Caron Lindsay (above), tireless defender of Willie Rennie and front-bench policy in general. She provided much of the heat in the otherwise good-natured discussion, with a succession of furious tirades against the SNP, including several (eg on the “unanswered questions” about pensions in an independent Scotland) which could in fact have been easily cleared up with a few minutes’ use of the Wings Over Scotland search box.

One in particular, though, stood out as perhaps an all-time low for the No camp.

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On the rare occasions when we write something about football, and the Old Firm in particular, we always get a few angry comments from people complaining that it’s got nothing to do with politics and therefore has no business on an independence website. We trust this will put a stop to that argument once and for all.

The story is nonsense, of course, and it’s no great surprise that the original Sunday People piece doesn’t name its supposed sources. But the mere fact of the notion being aired in the UK press at all is pretty strong evidence that we’re not the only people who understand the connection between Scottish sport and Scottish politics.

If you click this link, you’ll see some footage of the Labour MP for Glasgow South West, Ian Davidson, at today’s protest against the bedroom tax. The unnamed person with the camera approaches him and confronts him with a direct question.

There seems to be some doubt with regard to the veracity of the answer.

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There’s an isolated outbreak of proper journalism in the Herald today. A story by actual reporter Gerry Braiden (who must be relieved to have it offsetting a ridiculous puff piece about a 1p cut in beer duty prompting a crazed drinking bonanza in Scottish pubs over the Easter break) reveals that the head of Scotland’s largest police authority has been accused of the repeated harassment of a married woman.

“Phil Braat, chairman of the Strathclyde Police Authority, is the subject of complaints made to the force by a woman employee of a Glasgow City Council-related company last December.

The Herald understands that, despite the complaint being made almost four months ago, Mr Braat, a Labour councillor in Glasgow and a solicitor, has not been interviewed by the police regarding the accusations.”

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this perplexing mystery, we’ve added some emphasis to the quote above. For some reason we can’t seem to get a celebrated segment of an old TV chat show out of our minds.

The Radio Times was funded by the licence fee until the government sold it in 2011. We don’t remember receiving a cheque for our share. The extract below is from a feature about William Wallace in this week’s edition.

Let’s read that carefully. “Braveheart” has allegedly been “a gift to Alex Salmond and the SNP”. In what context? The context of “fuelling anti-English sentiment”. There’s no mention of winning elections, no mention of making people feel more positive about Scotland, no ambiguity whatsoever – the specific end to which the film has served the SNP, according to Dr Watson, is “the justification of anti-English sentiment”, and the associated perpetrating of violent assaults on young children.

We’ll run that past you again – the SNP love “Braveheart” because it helps them in their cynical aim of fostering xenophobia and getting little kids beaten up.

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This is a thing that really happened this afternoon:

It’s hard to know where to begin. It seems pointless to even try. An unelected trough-swilling convicted violent drunken criminal just used the rape of a child as a weapon against independence. More dignified things lurk slithering in sewers.

A play in three very short acts.

UNIONISTS:“We need information! We must have more information! We demand answers! Why aren’t voters being given the information they need? It must be given to them sooner, if not immediately! It’s an outrage!”

SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT: “We shall deliver this information.”

UNIONISTS:“Taxpayers’ money funding separatist propaganda! It’s an outrage!”

Hey ho. Just 18 more months of these idiots to go, readers.