Wings Over Scotland

Out of 100, exactly how humiliated do you feel today on learning that the leadership of your party has so little faith in you winning the Edinburgh Central nomination fair and square – despite all your advantages, connections and long party history – that it’s had to stack the deck with such an unprecedented, transparent, embarrassing fiddle to try to get you in? Because tbh, if it was us we’d be too ashamed to show our face.

No rush, take as long as you like. Just like you’re doing with independence.

The Wings Over Scotland Twitter account was – whether coincidentally or otherwise – banned very shortly after it made this famous quote from “1984” its pinned tweet:

So it was only ever a matter of time until a trans activist went there:

That’s an MSc in maths, an MA in statistics and a PhD student in statistics at Harvard University there, readers, publicly calling for the flexible redefinition of the meaning of the number 2 so that two plus two can sometimes make five. Humanity is doomed.

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Well, here’s a place we’ve been before.

Especially alert veteran readers will recall that this site, too, has had its advertising removed from a railway environment for being “political”, on the flimsiest of grounds. We doubt whether excessively-named feminist activist Kellie-Jay “Posie Parker” Keen-Minshull will be overly distressed about this turn of events – our experience was that it generated far more publicity than the adverts themselves could ever have hoped for, PLUS we got all our money back. Win-win!

But it’s still a disturbing occurrence for all sorts of obvious reasons.

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In the light of several news stories today, we thought it’d be useful to keep a record of which organisations and individuals had now publicly expressed strong reservations or outright opposition to the Scottish Government’s alarming and deeply illiberal proposed new Hate Crime Bill, and which had expressed support.

This list will be updated as required.

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Alert readers may have noticed that the hypothetical Wings list party is once again the talk of the steamie, with the usual suspects stamping their feet and pouting about it yet again on social media, in particular the firmly-ensconced SNP MP Pete Wishart and the worryingly obsessed former poll-analysis website WINGS OVER SCOTLAND IS BAD AND TERRIBLE AND STUART CAMPBELL SOMETIMES DOES SWEARS SO NOBODY WOULD EVER VOTE FOR HIM! Goes Pop.

(We’re not sure where this sudden outbreak of 18th-century Puritanism about Scottish people using colourful language has come from, to be honest. It seems the weirdest and least plausible grounds for objection imaginable in a country that’s literally world-famous for its enthusiastic embrace of swearing, but *shrug*.)

The trigger was a bizarre piece in yesterday’s Courier (also picked up by the National, the Evening Express and others). They phoned us last week ostensibly to talk about a new website set up by a bunch of loony Unionist zoomers who with amusingly ironic timing have named themselves “The Majority”, and whether we thought they’d have any impact or be able to attract funding.

We chatted perfectly amiably to the reporter for several minutes on the subject, so we were quite surprised when the story that eventually appeared didn’t contain a single mention of them, and instead was solely about the Wings party, which he’d also asked us a couple of “Oh, by the way, while I’m here”-type questions about.

So let’s just clarify a couple of things for the record (again).

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This week saw publication of the long-awaited Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report on alleged Russian interference in British affairs. Despite media hysteria, the report contained no new revelations, just all-too-familiar catastrophising about Moscow’s ill-defined “disinformation” efforts and warnings of the undue influence rich Russians (most of whom are actually Kremlin opponents) have bought themselves.

The most salient point for supporters of Scottish independence to consider was the allegation that Moscow’s interference efforts extended to the 2014 indyref. As Wings pointed out earlier this week, however, the “evidence” to support this sensational claim amounted to nothing more than a heavily-redacted single paragraph, citing “credible open source commentary” as its sole source.

A look at the paragraph’s accompanying footnote reveals the “credible open source” commentator was Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council. For those in the fortunate position of being unfamiliar with his work, Nimmo is known for, among other things, falsely identifying a Syrian-Australian blogger and a British pensioner as Russian bots – so clearly someone whose expertise should be relied upon to determine the extent of Russian infiltration into Scottish politics.

I mention this not simply to reveal the transparently amateurish nature of the ISC’s report but rather to offer a commentary on the SNP’s (predictably) disappointing response to its allegations.

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Alert readers will probably have noticed that earlier today we featured a post by SNP MP Kenny MacAskill making the seemingly-unsurprising statement that the purpose of his party is to “bring about the end of the British state”.

So we thought he might have wanted to check with his colleague Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokeman and an obsessive Russophobe, when we saw a snide quote from him in a Belfast Telegraph story disparaging former leader Alex Salmond (who’d advocated the reunification of Ireland during a chat with ex-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern) for the heinous crime of “proposing the disruption of the United Kingdom”.

It later transpired that there’d been an error and the quote should have been (and now is) attributed to a Scottish Conservatives spokesman.

But we couldn’t help noticing the complete lack of shock with which the comment was received on social media in the several hours between its publication and correction, as if nobody thought it at all implausible that McDonald would have said such a thing. (And indeed, it’s barely different from what he HAS said about Salmond’s RT show.) There were plenty harsh criticisms of him, but we didn’t see a single tweet suggesting that a mistake might have been made.

Never more so than in 2020, sometimes fiction is more believable than truth.

The closure of the UK Parliament for the summer holidays this week marked the end of my first political “year” with the SNP Group at Westminster, albeit a truncated one under unusual circumstances. Having served in Holyrood much is similar and familiar, even if anachronistic in style and reeking of snobbery. Staff are remarkably helpful and individual members can be exceedingly pleasant.

But this isn’t our Parliament and we’re most certainly not amongst friends.

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Maybe the flag could have been a bit bigger, but a solid 8/10 for the staunch rejection of all things nationalistic in this picture and tweet.

Jamie Halcro Johnston, incidentally, secured a whopping 4.1% of the Orkney vote for the Tories in the 2016 election, losing his deposit in the party’s lowest vote share ever (the nadir of a long slide from 23% in 2003), so we’re not absolutely sure he’s qualified to speak on behalf of the whole constituency, but we’ll let that one go this time in the light of such an absolutely stunning rejection of nationalism. Trebles all round.

The Scottish media is in a total frenzy this morning over the long-delayed publication of the “Russia Report” into alleged interference by Vladimir Putin’s regime in UK politics.

The Herald, Scotsman, Mail, Express and the i all lead their front pages with the story today, and the Telegraph did it yesterday. So we thought you might like to see the entirety of the indyref coverage that’s actually in the 55-page report.

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Farewell, civilised world.

But don’t worry, readers. The SNP have a cunning plan to secure independence by 2050, maybe, if they can find time in between letting rapists into women’s changing rooms, criminalising almost any sort of speech and stopping you getting cheap pizzas. No rush. There’s still a lot of MP wages and Short money to be claimed.