Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer got a bit exasperated on last night’s edition of the show as he tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to get Scottish Labour’s ever-smirking Jackie Baillie to give him anything resembling a straight answer to a question about Labour’s (lack of) policy on the bedroom tax.

As the well-fed welfare spokeswoman embarked on another pre-scripted soundbite of SNP-bashing rather than commit Labour councils to a policy of not evicting tenants for arrears related to the penalty charge, Brewer sighed (at around 12m 52s) that “I was vainly trying to take into consideration the people who might be affected by this” before giving up and moving on to his other guest.

Baillie was demanding that the Scottish Government instead bring forward legislation to make such evictions illegal – just a few days after Scottish Labour’s press office had strenuously denied to this very website that the party was making any such demands. But it’s easy to see why she’d be having trouble keeping track of her position, because to Labour the bedroom tax is little short of a delight.

Read the rest of this entry →

Read the rest of this entry →

Apologies for the lack of posts today, readers – been working on a small practical project and getting into an argument with a No voter who might just be persuadable, among other things. But amid it all we stumbled across this on the BBC website.

It’s a 2011 interview with Noel Gallagher about the English riots. Gallagher was one of the cultural figureheads famously invited to Downing Street by Tony Blair during the short-lived “Cool Britannia” phase before the shine wore off the New Labour project.

“Running up to the last election I wasn’t going to vote, until my wife said ‘You’ve got to vote’, and I’ve got to say it’s the first time I’ve picked the most ludicrous thing on the list – some guy who was gonna dress as a pirate.

But the Labour Party have managed to prove themselves to be just as sleazy and horrible as we all know the  Conservatives are. There’s nothing left to vote for any more.“

We empathise. But there’s still one part of Britain where that’s not true.

We suspect that for the vast majority of our readers, it’ll be quite hard to get to grips with the fact that the Scottish Daily Mail intends this headline as a criticism.

In 18 months’ time, Scots will have the chance to decide whether they’d rather spend their money on pay rises for public-sector workers or on tax cuts for the rich and bribes for them to buy second homes and inflate another housing bubble with. We must admit to being quite surprised that there’s a debate about it.

We already know that Labour, particularly in Scotland, have no policies on just about anything. But in the light of the past week’s glut of abstentions, we decided to see if we could find out if the party had any remaining principles either. The results were startling, by which we mean not startling in the slightest.

Below are just a few of the votes that Labour has abstained on, at both Westminster and Holyrood, in recent memory. What, we ponder rhetorically, is the point of having an Opposition that doesn’t ever actually oppose anything?

Read the rest of this entry →

We must admit that we didn’t see this one coming. Johann Lamont made a rather surprising admission 3m 16s into last night’s Newsnight Scotland special.

“There’ll be many people who voted SNP but don’t believe in independence who will breathe a sigh of relief, like me.”

Well, that goes some way to explaining the size of the SNP’s majority, at least.