Wings Over Scotland

So a few things need said about the events of the weekend.

Read the rest of this entry →

Weirdly, right after seeing this earlier this afternoon, we sat down to watch an episode of The Professionals on ITV4, which contained what seemed a rather apt segment.

We don’t think it’s a younger Iain Martin of the Telegraph (accompanied by colleagues Alan Cochrane and Tom Gallagher), but don’t make us swear to it.

Goodness gracious.

In what may be a new all-time low for the broadsheet press in Scotland, this morning’s Scottish edition of the Telegraph makes a front-page lead story out of a petition with a pathetic 4500 signatures, put together by some extremist Yoon nutters to express their rage that there might be a peak-time news show actually made in Scotland.

The idea of a so-called “Scottish Six”, whereby the main six o’clock news bulletin would be a single programme made by BBC Scotland and covering Scottish, UK and world news – rather than the current half-hour London-centric UK programme followed by 30 minutes of regional murdur’n’fitba in Reporting Scotland – has been exercising the media (and pretty much nobody else) for the best part of 20 years.

But now it’s become a constitutional battleground, and the funny thing about it is that the two sides are fighting bitterly over something neither of them actually really wants.

Read the rest of this entry →

Last night, MP Natalie McGarry made another heavily-qualified semi-apology to the popular abusive-tweeter enthusiast JK Rowling, because that’s how bullying works. (As far as we know McGarry has still refused Rowling’s demand that she make a sizeable donation to Rowling’s charity under threat of legal action.)

One of George Orwell’s most-quoted lines is “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

We wonder who was trying to silence the torrent of drivel below, then.

Read the rest of this entry →

Sometimes it’s the smallest, most trivial things that give you away. Graham Grant is the Home Affairs Editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, and earlier this morning he tweeted this snarky dig at prominent independence supporter and pundit Pat Kane, also of the primarily-1980s band Hue And Cry:

Ostensibly it’s a throwaway gag aimed at puncturing an opponent’s pomposity and over-inflated self-regard while portraying the journalist as an arch, wise cynic.

But hold on a second.

Read the rest of this entry →

We listened to an interesting chat on Good Morning Scotland earlier today (it’s right at the start, just after the news) featuring Gerry Hassan and the sharp New Statesman reporter Stephen Bush, which briefly discussed a curious political phenomenon of the 2000s where people said they liked certain policies until they were told they were Tory policies, at which point their opinions changed.

It put us rather in mind of a classic 2000AD comic strip called The Ballad Of Halo Jones, and in particular a short episode from it about a character called The Glyph, which seemed to us to sum up the current dilemma facing the Labour Party on both sides of the border – but especially in Scotland, as was rather strikingly illustrated by a revealing interview with Kezia Dugdale on Friday.

So we thought we’d share it with you, because sometimes pictures say a thousand words. Especially if there are several of them and they also have words on them.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Herald columnist Iain Macwhirter has had some wise words to say on the subject of social media in the past few weeks, most recently on New Year’s Day:

The month before, though, he’d been even more to the point.

Read the rest of this entry →

We tweeted this proposition last night (the quote comes from a blog post yesterday by Scottish Labour madcase and all-round comedy relief Ian Smart):

We thought you might enjoy some of the responses as much as we did.

Read the rest of this entry →

A strange phenomenon we’ve remarked upon a few times since the independence referendum is the inexplicable undying rage of a certain subset of Unionist voters.

Having won the vote, a casual observer might expect them to be happy, but instead they appear to exist in a constant state of fury.

(Our own best guess is that they were expecting to triumph by a crushing margin of two or three to one – some fretted that it might only be a 20-point victory – and then suffered the double blow of a much closer result that kept the Yes movement very much alive coupled with a massive surge in SNP membership and support.)

A demented anti-SNP tactical-voting campaign for this year’s general election – led by, among others, a frothing ultra-Loyalist-nutter-type by the name of Andrew Skinner – recorded one of the most spectacular failures in history as the Nats captured 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, only narrowly missing the other three, and the party’s poll ratings have continued to rise since then.

So this week, Mr Skinner decided to try for a more manageable target.

Read the rest of this entry →

To mark the day that we both appeared in the Herald’s “Power 100” list of “The leading Scots who shape our lives” – and she had another go at trolling us – we’d like to dedicate this wonderful tune sincerely to the popular children’s author JK Rowling:

We’ll try to understand her problems more sensitively in future.