Wings Over Scotland

A week ago, readers, I had not the slightest interest in bringing Wings Over Scotland back full-time. I had my Twitter account again and was having fun and I was happy with that. It scratched the itch of being able to engage with politics (and people) without the depressing business of wading in it for work.

Having enjoyed a summer of long sunny walks feeding the swans and refreshing lager shandies in riverside pubs, I was preparing to hunker down over the cold dark winter and finally get some much-delayed writing for the Wings memoir done.

And then I witnessed the quite extraordinary sight of an elected member of Parliament, in the shape of the SNP’s pico-witted ambulant brain vacuum Karen Adam, publicly gloating about having managed to shut down the voice of someone critical of her party.

At the same time, an extremely minor blogger (the word “rival” would be to over-dignify them) re-opened hostilities in his campaign of self-declared “open warfare” against this site, with a rapid succession of posts (just a few of dozens) forming such a demented scattershot tirade that to patiently debunk all of it would have taken until Christmas.

And I’ll be honest, folks, it all pushed my buttons a wee bit. It really shouldn’t have, but it was properly outrageous and I’m occasionally human, so I thought “Sod it, if I’m going to have to put up with all this crap anyway I might as well make it worthwhile”.

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Well, it looks like Wings is coming back, then. Blimey. So let’s see where we’re going to be picking things up from. Exactly eight years ago today, Nicola Sturgeon took over as First Minister from Alex Salmond.

How has it gone?

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Good heavens, readers. We’re afraid we’ve rather been forced into yet another post this month on our decreasingly-dormant website.

As many of you have already noticed, just a week after being unsuspended by Twitter (to surprisingly unanimous approval in the media from friends and enemies alike, and from some startlingly unexpected sources), early this afternoon the @WingsScotland account was kicked out again. According to the only email Twitter have sent us the reason for the sanction was “ban evasion”, which is perplexing since they’d just lifted the ban and there was nothing to evade.

But the plot subsequently thickened as a procession of SNP types claimed to be responsible, all triumphantly waving completely different supposed offences, none of which we’ve heard anything about.

Naturally we’ve enquired of Twitter what’s going on, and will update you as necessary. But to be honest with you, folks, if the SNP are this desperate to silence our voice, maybe it’s time we thought about returning for good.

Is it time to blow three-and-a-half years of dust off the old Fundraise-O-Tron and get back to work properly? Or should we stay in peaceful retirement and just stick a post up once in a while when we feel like it? What say you, chums?

It appears the Scottish Parliament – the great and mighty engine of a proud nation’s democracy, with a declaration carved onto its very walls that it’s a place built for the people to peeble their representatives wi’ stanes should they displease them – is now such a fragile, cowering, timorous house of straw that polite middle-aged women are being ejected from its public galleries for wearing the wrong colour of scarves.

Although it’s apparently fine for the Parliament’s shameful excuses for lawmakers to use colours to openly display their own ideological allegiances to the other side.

We suppose we should be grateful nobody had any ribbons to hand, or a full-scale terrorist alert might have been declared, riot police deployed and martial law declared.

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Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before, readers.

Because you won’t be wrong.

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Yesterday we watched the first day’s proceedings of For Women Scotland taking the Scottish Government to court over its definition of what a woman is.

The topic is really very niche but will affect us all if the judge rules for the government (we won’t know the outcome for at least a month or two), so here’s the short version of what it’s all about.

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As you might expect, our return to Twitter yesterday caused quite a commotion among the more sensitive flowers on the social media platform. At the head of the pouting mob was of course our dear old pal SNP MP Pete Wishart, who was clutching his pearls as usual about such terrible elements as ourselves – “vile abusers” – putting people off independence.

And at such times, it’s useful to remember how much he cares about independence:

Because by his own admission, Pete Wishart would sell out Scottish independence at its most crucial moment for the sake of getting to wear the Speaker’s silk gown – adorned on special state occasions with golden lace, frogs and a wig – in the House Of Commons and uphold all its ancient traditions like a good little Briton.

Scotland’s whole future, 300 years of struggle to regain control of its own destiny, could hang in the balance, held solely in the hands of one man, and rather than disappoint the grey eminences of the British establishment and risk being frowned upon in their oak-panelled subsidised dining rooms, Pete Wishart would say “No”.

(We don’t know if you get an even bigger pension for being the Speaker than the £50,000 or so a year that Wishart will trouser when he leaves the UK Parliament after 20 years of spectacular non-achievement, but we’d be prepared to hazard a guess.)

There’s a word to describe people like that, which is never used on Wings, but we’re making an exception just this once.

Someone had to remind us that today is Wings Over Scotland’s 11th birthday.

In a grim indictment of Scotland’s once-vaunted political new media, a site that’s been officially closed since May 2021 is still far and away the most-read in the country, despite that readership now being mostly angry overgrown children squabbling with each other in the comments. People would apparently still, by a vast margin, rather read that than endure the tedium of Bella Caledonia or Believe In Scotland.

We’ve said pretty much all that there is to be said about that miserable state of affairs already, so we won’t repeat ourselves. God help the independence movement.

Last week Nicola Sturgeon’s government introduced the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (GRRB) at stage one. Cabinet Secretary Shona Robison’s introductory speech sounded reasonable and fair, but those words do not match the deeds of the SNP leadership and they do not reflect reality.

The behaviour of the SNP leadership towards anyone with even the most benign question about this legislation has been aggressive, dismissive, and openly hostile.

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In the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, the Scottish Greens received just 4.7% of all the votes cast. (255,314 of 5,419,544). The SNP got 44% – almost 10 times as many.

So we’re not sure how the Greens – a party that well over 90% of Scots don’t support – suddenly appear to be in charge.

Nor, perhaps more to the point, do we understand why.

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Blue-haired brain vacuum Kirsty Blackman in Westminster yesterday, during the SNP’s big showpiece “let’s pretend we’re doing something about independence” debate.

So presumably she’s made it a priority since being elected seven years ago, right?

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Kezia Dugdale, the hapless leader who took Scottish Labour to 14% in the polls, is one of the most extravagantly-paid people in Scotland who has no discernible talent or significance to public life whatsoever.

As well as being the Director of the John Smith Policy Centre (a job with no known responsibilities but which nevertheless pays around the same as being an MSP making laws in the Scottish Parliament) she writes regular columns in The Times and The Courier and is now, hilariously, the new Professor of Practice in Public Service in Glasgow University.

(A post with unspecified duties and unknown salary and which was also not, as far as anyone can tell, ever publicly advertised.)

We were bored so we thought we’d find out, via Panelbase, if her latest lucrative role was perhaps the result of a noticeably impressive performance in the first one.

Ah. Not so much.

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