Wings Over Scotland

It’s difficult to know where to even start on the absolutely extraordinary reaction to our post about yesterday’s meeting of the SNP National Executive Committee. Our traffic exploded to levels not seen since 2014, racking up tens of thousands of pageviews an hour, and social media was aflame with argument into the small hours of the morning.

A whole raft of issues arose from our exclusive revelations, but the one we want to talk about now is the one that was buried at the bottom of what a panicked SNP hastily and laughably produced as the “minutes” of the meeting, and we didn’t even notice it until a couple of hours after the original post.

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On the very fabric of the Scottish Parliament – specifically its Canongate Wall, across the road from a building curiously called “Watergate” – are inscribed 26 quotes, carved into stone hewn from every corner of the country, about the sort of Scotland that the building and those working inside it are supposed to stand for and aspire to.

One of them, from the celebrated author Sir Walter Scott, reads thus:

“When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.”

It’s a phrase that’s hard to interpret as anything but a paean to stern accountability. Should our representatives, it says, fail to live up to the standards that we expect and demand of them, they should be pelted with stones.

Now, we must assume – for this is the 21st century, and public stoning is a barbaric act limited to but a few of the UK’s allies – that said stones were intended by the architects to be understood as metaphorical ones, presumably in the form of harsh criticism.

It’s alarming, then, that so many of the people currently trying to get elected to that Parliament apparently instead believe that any criticism of them should be a crime.

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Just when you thought it was over:

Suddenly there’s a weasel in the works.

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I first joined this union in roughly 1992. On the very few occasions that I’ve sought its assistance it’s been worse than useless, but I’ve retained membership for most of the period because I believe in the principle of trade unions.

However, there are limits, and they’ve just been breached.

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The following article by Conor Matchett appears in today’s Scotsman:

It’s a pretty standard anti-Wings smear piece, except for this bit:

which is simply a flat-out lie. We can’t speak for Kenny MacAskill, but we do know for sure that Wings has NOT been contacted for comment by Mr Matchett.

We have an easily-accessible contact form and our details are known to the Scotsman from the last time we had to sue them for lying about us, but we have received no communication of any form from any representative of the newspaper in connection to this story. (We’ve checked our email Spam and Junk folders.)

We’d happily have provided a quote if we HAD been asked, to give the lazy hatchet job (perhaps “Matchett job”) at least a minimal veneer of balance and fairness as a boost to the badly-ailing paper’s “trusted, fact-checked journalism”. Since we’re banned from Twitter, perhaps someone could pass that on to Mr Matchett.

In the meantime, Wings readers should look forward to some more posts from SNP politicians, which we’ll be publishing later today.

Okay, we’re trolling a bit with the title there. But fair’s fair.

Because some REALLY shonky, and very obviously co-ordinated, shenanigans went on this past weekend, but at least the above is the truth.

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It’s our sad duty to report this fact to you, readers: our experience of sending Freedom Of Information requests to the Scottish Government is basically that the more answers you get from them, the less information you end up having.

See below for a case in point.

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So it looks like The Spectator spent a lot of money on a lawyer for nothing today.

Because while pretty much every journalist, pundit and legal expert reporting the case agrees that the amendment made to the Section 11 order protecting the anonymity of the complainers in the Alex Salmond case is an important and significant one, it hasn’t impressed the only person whose opinion actually matters: Andy Wightwash.

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So this was a bit odd.

Once again we’ve clipped the entire question and “answer” so you can see nothing’s been taken out of context, but the important bit is from 2m 30s to 2m 53s.

Davidson’s question was quite complex but boiled down to why Nicola Sturgeon hadn’t properly recorded details and minutes of meetings on Scottish Government business, in direct breach of the Ministerial Code.

That’s a valid question in itself, to which there was no meaningful response, but it was what Sturgeon said right at the end that raised our eyebrows.

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First Minister’s Questions was very interesting today. Ruth Davidson had some tricky ones which Nicola Sturgeon simply didn’t even attempt to look like she was answering, and we might come back to one of them in particular a little later on.

But Jackie Baillie’s were even more pointed, especially this one:

With our trademark scrupulous fairness we’ve included the full question and answer, and they raise a whole series of issues, but if you’re in a hurry the key part we want to talk about right now is between 0.18 and 0.26.

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Iain Macwhirter has a good column on the farcical Fabiani inquiry in the Herald today. But one piece of it really jumped out at us.

Wait, what?

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