Wings Over Scotland

This is the 5,000th post since Wings Over Scotland began in November 2011, which is just shy of two a day, every single day, since then. We wanted such a landmark post to be something serious and significant, but in light of the utter brain-melting futility of trying to write anything sensible about politics in the UK today that won’t be overtaken by ridiculous events within seven minutes, screw it, we’re going to this instead.

So we’ll see you all later this evening for the result of Theresa May’s confidence vote. What’s the worst that could happen?

No, really, we’re asking.

We all knew this already, of course. Last year we commissioned a poll from Panelbase which found an enormous 41-point gap between Yes and No voters on immigration. But it was still nice to have it both confirmed and laid out so clearly by Sir John Curtice on Good Morning Scotland earlier today.

(About 1h 55m in. We’re having some trouble recording sound on our new PC at the moment, we’ll get you a proper audio link as soon as we’ve figured it out.)

“Support for the Yes movement is associated with being more likely [around 50% more likely, in fact] to have a positive view about immigration.

So we’re certainly confirming that Scotland does have this rather unusually civic nationalist movement. It’s not a movement that says you have to be born in Scotland for us to value you, it is something that does seem to be relatively open-minded.

On the other side of the coin what we’re discovering – and the reason why in the end Scotland why doesn’t look any more liberal than England and Wales – is that when you look at those who vote for the Conservatives or for the Labour Party, for the Unionist parties, they emerge as being less favourable towards immigration than are Conservative and Labour voters south of the border.”

It’s worth keeping to hand the next time some witless Scottish Labour goon tries to tell you that independence is bad because it’s “separatist” and that voting for the Union is the international-solidarity option. Because that’s a flat-out lie.

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We now have the verdicts on Brexit from three of the UK’s four nations. The Scottish Parliament, speaking for the Scottish nation, voted overwhelmingly this afternoon to reject both Theresa May’s draft agreement and leaving the EU without a deal.

And it wasn’t alone.

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Posed by Kezia Dugdale in the Holyrood chamber today:

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At a time of unprecedented political chaos and uncertainty, just about the only thing you can still count on is that for any given situation, senior Labour figures will issue proclamations both firmly in favour of it and stoutly opposed to it, usually the same day.

So the stories below, which are respectively from today’s Scotsman and today’s Times, won’t come as much of a shock to anyone.

But against the odds, we think we’ve made some sense of it.

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All political discourse is plagued with genuine imbeciles, of course. But what’s far more depressing is when educated and normally perceptive people merely act like imbeciles for money, such as the case of Alex Massie in the Sunday Times today.

Because for the last two years, commentators who ought to know better have insisted in presenting Scotland’s choice as between Brexit or Brexit plus independence, and solemnly concluding that the uncertainties and risks of the latter being piled on top of those of the former prove that independence is no solution.

And we don’t care to have our intelligence insulted in that way.

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Because we know the poor lad’s not very bright.

Yes, Murdo. Yes it has.

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So this was in the Times football section today:

And you find yourself thinking, “Well gee, why might THAT be, Alex?”

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If we were to write an article every time Murdo Fraser said something moronic, we’d have to rename this site Wings Over Murdo Fraser, and drink an awful lot of Red Bull to be able to cover it all.

Stuff like this, for example, is almost too easy.

43% (actually 45.3% excluding Don’t Knows) is considerably more than Murdo Fraser has ever achieved in an election, either himself or as part of a party. His average over the seven elections he’s contested and lost since 1999 is just 30.1%, and until a blip in 2016 it had been falling lower and lower each time, as people have watched how he performed as an MSP and got less and less keen on the idea.

That’s still actually slightly more than the 28.6% his party secured in Scotland at the last election, though, in what was nevertheless generally regarded as an unusually impressive performance. Two years earlier they gathered just 14.9% of the votes cast.

Yet neither Fraser nor the Tories disappear for a generation every time Scotland tells them to go and get stuffed. Fraser keeps trousering an MSP’s fat salary despite two decades of unbroken and unequivocal personal rejection from the electorate, even as he demands that the independence movement gives up after losing ONE vote.

But in his defence, his leader’s not setting him much of an example.

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