We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:
The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.
Tags: from the archives
Category
comment, history, scottish politics, uk politics
This site is not terribly inclined towards sympathy for popular children’s author Joanne Kathleen Rowling. We’re still waiting on an apology for her donating a crucial million pounds towards ensuring Scotland stayed ruled by Tories and got dragged out of the EU against its will, on the bonkers premise that voting No would magically put Scots in a position of unprecedented popularity and power within the UK.
As a smart piece of analysis it’s right up there with “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”, and it would have been nice if at some point in the last six years she’d held her hands up and gone “Y’know what, I called that one really badly wrong. Sorry about the whole Tory/Brexit thing, everyone. We all make mistakes”.
(Wings, of course, got it exactly right at the time.)
We still don’t think she deserves seven years in prison, though.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, disturbing, idiots, scottish politics, transcult
Oh no, someone’s let Ian Murray say words again.
There’s only one small problem with that complaint.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
comment, idiots, scottish politics, uk politics
Some in the independence movement got quite excited yesterday about a widely-reported poll showing that 63% of Scots want a new indyref in the next five years. It reminded us that we’d had a question on the subject in our own Panelbase poll earlier this month that we hadn’t got around to talking about.
Because of what we wanted to find out, that question was asked in a slightly strange way, so let’s quickly explain.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: poll
Category
analysis, comment, disturbing, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve just learned that we’ve lost the appeal over our defamation by the then-Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, when she repeatedly and publicly made the appalling, damaging and wholly untrue smear that I was a homophobe, even though the appeal judges all agreed with the original sheriff that the smear was false and defamatory.
But when it comes to deciding the verdict in a defamation case, it seems that the fact that absolutely everyone agrees I was definitely defamed is, to borrow a phrase from later in the judgement,“of no materiality”.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
admin, comment, media, scottish politics, scum
When the news isn’t news:
Lots of Scottish newspapers (most notably everything in the Herald And Times Group) had already ducked out of providing ABC figures at all, but this will be a godsend for the rest to save their growing embarrassment.
Wings readers can remember the pitiful state of the last published figures here.
Category
comment, media, stats
On the 1st of January, Chinese authorities took the decision to close the Wuhan food market. The following day, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, were confirmed to have contracted 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus) which we now know as COVID-19.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a New Year message, from the private island of Mustique in the Caribbean, that the “first item” on his agenda remained his commitment to take Britain out of the EU by the end of January.
Within weeks the virus had spread across the world to many countries including Italy, Germany, Australia, the USA and of course the UK.
Read the rest of this entry →
Category
apocalypse, comment, scottish politics, uk politics
We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.
Which is just two months after this happened:
So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.
Category
comment, corruption, disturbing, history, investigation, scottish politics
