This week on Wings has been altogether more navel-gazey than we’re comfortable with, as various SNP MPs have mounted a series of all-out personal attacks on the site before the weekend’s crucial NEC elections.
So we’ll have a proper article for you a little later on today, but in the meantime it’d be remiss of us not to tidy up the last fragments of shrapnel, so we’ll direct you to the right of reply to Alyn Smith’s column that The National kindly gave us today:
(Sadly they chose to disable comments, we’d quite have enjoyed the reaction from the few remaining diehard leadership loyalists still posting there.)
We couldn’t help but chuckle yesterday when the £100K-a-year Westminster MP and obsessive Wings Over Scotland reader “Pension Pete” Wishart announced – in the space of six minutes – that this site was simultaneously an irrelevance that nobody listened to, but also somehow one of the greatest threats to independence.
Wings Over Scotland marked its ninth birthday earlier this month. To be honest, we totally forgot about it until someone reminded us. Normally we mark the anniversary with a small reflection and taking of stock over how things are going, but this year we couldn’t be bothered – we’d already mentioned readership stats in August.
But today in The National we found out that we were apparently dead.
But reports of our demise have been, as the saying goes, somewhat exaggerated.
Some years ago, a friend of mine was on a car journey along the motorway, with their brother driving. The night before there had been a storm and high winds. The bad weather had continued into the morning before easing, but the wind was still strong.
They were chatting in the car and as they continued to chat, my friend noticed that further along, a motorway stanchion that holds the lights had fallen across their path. It was blocking two of the three lanes, including the one that they were on. Despite that, they continued to chat as if it wasn’t there.
The obstacle drew nearer and nearer. Finally my friend said to his brother, “Aren’t you going to drive round that light?” His brother swerved and made it into the unblocked lane with feet to spare.
I asked my friend why they hadn’t swerved sooner. “Neither of us could believe it was there”, he said.
We were going to write a post about today’s Sunday National front page lead story, but it would just have been an angry rant, so instead we’ll let our readers make their own judgements on how convinced they are by this bloviating guff:
On 18 September 2014, Scotland had control over its future. Scots could choose their own path, or continue to have decisions imposed upon them. Those of us supporting the former came close but not close enough. As a result, Scotland exited the EU against its will, is once more under the heel of a right-wing government and now finds its Parliament under attack from London.
Yet the dream has never died and demands for the right to choose our own destiny are growing. Scotland needs to be in the position it held on 18 September 2014, when power lay with its people. It’s their democratic right to decide, so why would you ever cede that power?
No explanation is given for why “writer at large”Neil Mackay has suddenly conducted a “wide-ranging, exclusive interview” with “one of Britain’s most senior spy chiefs” for today’s Herald On Sunday.
As far as we’re aware absolutely nothing has happened in respect of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent” to make the subject topical. Maybe Mackay just coincidentally bumped into Sir David Omand down the pub or something.
