Wings Over Scotland

Well, imagine our surprise.

If only we’d been telling you for the last two years, eh?

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We suppose we should be happy to learn that Scottish Government ministers are at least still sometimes capable of understanding that men and women are different and there are times when it’s inappropriate for men to be in women’s spaces.

We just wish they didn’t keep reminding us of something so much.

We really hope the 27% of Scots who already think the Sun revolves around the Earth isn’t getting bigger.

Last week, in the biggest city in Scotland, a young mother was found dead next to her starving infant child, because Scotland’s economic, immigration and welfare policies are decided hundreds of miles away in a foreign country by a party that Scots haven’t voted for in 65 years but which has ruled Scotland for 42 of those years anyway.

There’s other stuff about GERS too, but that seems the important bit.

The Sunday Times carries a quite surprising story today. (And that’s not just because the person in the picture isn’t actually Liz Lloyd at all.)

We’ll pause for but a brief moment to contemplate the assertion that this unelected, unaccountable civil servant might be “the second most powerful woman in the Scottish government” and then move on to the interesting bit.

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Much as we might wish otherwise, we haven’t been able to help noticing other pro-indy websites doubling down on the “BOTH VOTES SNP, TRUST IN QUEEN NICOLA, THE 10TH MANDATE IS THE ONE THAT’LL WORK!” routine lately.

And however much we’ve tried to get people to grasp the seemingly-obvious fact that Boris Johnson is not looking at this debate from the same viewpoint we all are, reality doesn’t seem to be getting through to everyone yet.

So we thought we’d try a new tack.

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So that you don’t have to, we endured tonight’s Dani Garavelli programme on Radio 4 as well as last night’s Kirsty Wark one, and to be honest there’s very little to report.

It’s a statement of the blindingly obvious – the SNP is currently split between young Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for whom independence is only one aspect of creating a pure and woke new Scotland, and older Alex Salmond-supporting traditionalists for whom independence itself is the only true goal and whatever happens afterwards is in the hands of democracy and fate – interspersed with Garavelli and her media pals taking the chance to air some of their own unconnected grievances like pouting toddlers.

So we get Garavelli bleating at length about how lots of nasty people on the internet have called her out for her indisputable, provable contempt-of-court identification of one of the accusers of Alex Salmond, and yet another demented rant from poor old David “reds under the bed” Leask about the evils of this site, and so on and so forth.

You can listen to it by clicking the pic above, but frankly we wouldn’t bother.

Last night’s BBC Scotland documentary on the Alex Salmond trial was so shockingly biased that even the Herald, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Gerry Hassan couldn’t quite bring themselves to defend it. Anita Singh’s two-star review in the Telegraph said:

“The verdict in the Salmond case, by the way, was not guilty. He was cleared of all charges of sexually assaulting ten women while Scotland’s First Minister. However, it was pretty clear that the programme-makers hoped he would be found guilty; the first 45 minutes of the hour-long film were devoted to the prosecution case.”

While another female reviewer not known for being terribly fond of Mr Salmond, Alison Rowat for the Herald, observed:

“Taken with Ms Wark’s observations as the trial went on, it felt like proceedings were being played out all over again. Except this time Mr Salmond was not there to defend himself. 

Ultimately, you had to ask whether the film gave Mr Salmond a fair shake. For this reason, and many more, The Trial Of Alex Salmond had to appear far and above the fray on which it was reporting. From where this viewer sat, it did not pass that test.”

But not everyone kept their grip on reality.

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The last words spoken in Kirsty Wark’s documentary “The Trial Of Alex Salmond”, which just aired on BBC Scotland, are spoken by an unnamed actress letting rip with the full BAFTA range of quivering emotions as she reads out the words of a completely anonymous woman (we don’t even get to know her trial pseudonym letter) who last year falsely accused Alex Salmond of sexually assaulting her.

“What you’re saying is a man can try to kiss a woman, or he can say completely inappropriate things to her, when he’s 30 years older than her and he’s the First Minister of Scotland.

I’m worried about what this says more widely to other women, or just to us as a society. I mean, where does this leave us?”

Now, since the court found that neither of those things actually happened, the logical answer in that person’s case ought surely to be “facing prosecution for perjury”. But readers will be astonished to learn that that isn’t where the show went.

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If you didn’t already know that the BBC were going to run a character-assassination hatchet job on Alex Salmond tonight (and another one tomorrow), you could surmise it easily enough from the state of the Scottish media in the last few days.

We’ve almost lost count of the attack pieces on the former First Minister in the run-up to the show, from specially-commissioned opinion polls to conveniently-timed releases of allegations of unspecified “bullying” during his leadership and highly selective leaks from the documentary itself.

But it’s today’s Daily Record that dredges the depths of the journalistic sewer with a barrel and then scrapes the very bottom of it for the grubbiest, oiliest sludge it can find.

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Our regular weekend comedian Chris Cairns is off on a golf holiday this weekend (in fairness he’s only had four so far this year and it’s already August), but this is a sicker joke than anything he’s ever come up with.

We haven’t covered Martin Keating’s court case because we have some unanswered concerns about its transparency and communication, but it’s doing just fine without us, having passed £100,000 of its £155,000 funding target earlier today.

It’s bad enough that some random activist is having to do this and pay for it when the Scottish Government – who SHOULD have been doing it three years ago – sits with its thumb up its hole staring out of the window, but having their representatives actively attack and try to sabotage it is disgusting to a degree we can barely find words for.

We’ve had our fair share of doubts about stuff of late, but if Scottish independence achieved nothing more than putting a useless wage-stealing tosser like Pete Wishart out of a cushy Westminster job-for-life, it’d be worth doing for that alone.