Wings Over Scotland

And now for tonight’s headlines.

Police Scotland have nevertheless denied that prisoners in their custody are being excessively pampered, following reports that a man was hustled out of St Leonard’s station in Edinburgh with an electric blanket over his head.

Meanwhile, following the Supreme Court ruling in the For Women Scotland case, the force’s HQ at Tulliallan was burgled by a gang of militant transactivists who stole all the toilets. Officers say they have nothing to go on.

More comedy news as we get it, folks.

We’re thinking of just handing over Wings to Grok for the summer so we can spend all our time feeding the swans, readers. Here’s what the Twitter artificial intelligence bot said when we asked it to assess today’s National front page.

Sounds about right to us. We’re off for a walk.

At first, this merely sounds like the worst day out ever.

But for supporters of independence, in fact it’s even grimmer than that.

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Wait, not genocide. Biscuits. We’re thinking of biscuits. Sorry about that.

As you were, everyone. Mmm, biscuits.

This is what Labour say in Scotland:

And this is what they say elsewhere, when they think nobody in Scotland is looking:

One day someone’s going to tell them about the internet, and our life’s going to get a lot more difficult. Until that day, though, let’s just enjoy the laughs.

Don Paterson is a celebrated Scottish poet, writer and musician. The essay below comes from a new anthology of Scottish writers called Irish Pages: Scotland, and is reproduced with his permission. 

Remember The Vow? Most of us have tried to forget it. This was Westminster’s Hail Mary as polling day approached in the 2014 referendum; a vote that Yessers – people tend to forget this part too – initially had no real expectation of winning, until an inspirationally positive campaign saw the polls draw neck-and-neck.

Then lo! There it was, splashed across the Daily Record: a fancy-font promise from Westminster party leaders that if Scotland voted to stay within the UK, we would enjoy new devolved powers. There was some other waffle about defence and opportunities and having an equal share in the UK’s prosperity. But the message was clear enough. We would be listened to.

Aye, right.

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We’re getting there, folks.

Keep pushing.

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Not for us, admittedly.

(Kelly’s article is here. Link to Grok’s answer here. The ChatGPT analysis that triggered the article can be read in this tweet thread. A verifiable analysis by Grok of the debate, based on a neutral question, can be read here.)

So this is where the SNP are at now.

The legal imprint at the bottom means that that’s official SNP election communication. One assumes it’s intended for leaflets to be put through actual voters’ letterboxes.

We’re almost lost for words.

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Hi! I noticed, with very considerable amusement, your complaint last night that I hadn’t made a “substantive reply” to the [EDIT] EIGHT posts (totalling nearly 11,000 words) of semi-coherent ranting about me that you’ve made on your site in the last eight days.

(I’ll be absolutely honest, I’ve only skimmed the last few.)

We both know the reason that’s so tear-streamingly comical, of course.

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The deranged stalker who’s now posted 72 blogposts totalling 62,500 words attacking Wings in the last few years had another go last night, over this.

And as a rule we don’t bother addressing them because they’re so demented you could spend 5,000 words pulling apart all the individual strands of lunacy every time, and lunatics thrive on attention, but this one does merit a very brief comment.

Because “Vote Labour, get indy” wasn’t our plan. It was John Swinney’s.

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At the weekend, Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman was filmed applauding as a notoriously unhinged transactivist ranted through a megaphone to a small and almost exclusively male crowd of protestors about how he was going to openly break the law by continuing to use women’s public toilets, and addressing JK Rowling with the words “We should all take a shite on you, you heinous creeping old bitch”.

At another protest, Chapman herself asserted that the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling on the correct interpretation of the Equality Act 2010 was motivated by not by a solemn consideration of the law or by the arguments of counsel who appeared before it, but by “bigotry, prejudice and hatred”.

Chapman is – incredibly – Deputy Convener of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, and as such her comments sparked a storm of wholly justified outrage over her flagrant breach not only of Parliamentary rules but also of the law – specifically the Judiciary and Courts (Scotland) Act 2008, which requires all MSPs to uphold the independence of the judiciary.

But Chapman today refused to back down.

And the call for consequences has grown far beyond the usual suspects.

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