Wings Over Scotland

As overt direct interference by unelected, unaccountable foreign media corporations in national politics continues to intensify, readers of Wings will be aware that it’s now considerably more difficult for us to even let you know when we have a new post up.

(Obviously this isn’t quite so much of an issue when we’re on holiday – which despite the flurry of activity in the last week or so we still officially are, since the coronavirus has knackered everything up and unavoidably delayed the decision we’d planned to make last month – but the general principle remains alarming.)

So here are some things you can do.

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There’s a great quote from one of the founders of the SNP that Yes types are fond of using in response to the endless onslaught of brainless Unionist accusations that the independence movement is “anti-English”.

But we had no suspicion of just how remarkably true it was until now.

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It’s now more than a month since this site revealed the widespread breach by a number of Scottish journalists/newspapers – the most prominent being Dani Garavelli of Scotland On Sunday and Tortoise Media – of the legally-protected anonymity of one of the accusers in the Alex Salmond trial.

Until last week we’d had no response from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) beyond an initial acknowledgement, and no action of any kind had apparently been taken against any of the perpetrators, even though the pro-Salmond blogger Craig Murray has been cited for prosecution for allegedly similar breaches.

Alarmingly, all of the information identifying the woman was (and at the time of writing this article is) still publicly available in their articles, exposing her to possible danger. So last week we got in touch with the COPFS to seek clarification.

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We were a bit startled to be leaked this early draft from the 2021 SNP manifesto:

We’re sure it’ll be softened up a bit in the editing process.

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It’s pretty interesting that today marks the first really tangible diversification between the Scottish and UK governments with regard to the coronavirus crisis: the Holyrood administration has rejected Westminster’s much-criticised new main slogan and will be sticking with the old “STAY HOME” message.

(Here at Wings we’re mainly upset that the extremely misguided new campaign will undermine our years-old pro-alertness position.)

Because what our latest Panelbase poll showed is that there’s a huge gulf between perception and reality in Scotland when it comes to virus strategy.

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Just an SNP activist tonight, saying that it doesn’t matter whether there’s a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament or not, and that it’s undemocratic for a new pro-indy party to stand democratically for election like any other and take seats from Unionists (as long as the SNP hold power in the devolved administration, of course).

Other SNP activists, meanwhile, are already openly trying to dig dirt and undermine the women leading the new party, which is only planning to contest list seats and therefore poses no threat to the SNP whatsoever. Does anyone still think the current SNP care about independence, rather than power?

Alert readers may have noticed that this site is once more under attack from Twitter. Following the suspension of the main Wings account last December, and one we set up for the prospective political party – suspensions which Twitter has never justified, because the Wings account did not break any of its rules – it has now suspended my personal account (@RevStu) and the account of old spinoff site The Sealand Gazette, both supposedly for evading the ban on the @WingsScotland account.

This allegation is clearly a nonsense, because the RevStu account predated the Wings one by years and was in constant use from its creation up until this morning, and the Gazette account was only used briefly as an emergency backup for the RevStu one when it was temporarily locked at the weekend for unspecified “suspicious activity”, which is a technical security issue rather than a suspension for supposed wrongdoing.

The actual reason for the suspension of all four accounts is this site’s opposition to controversial and massively unpopular transgender ideology, which Twitter supports and which is currently the subject of some hotly-contested and important lawmaking.

(It’s the same reason why Twitter has banned scores, probably hundreds of feminists for the most absurdly innocuous of tweets perceived as challenging trans ideology.)

In other words, these actions are direct censorship and deliberate interference in the political affairs of a country by an unaccountable and unelected foreign corporation serving the interests of a massive right-wing pharmacological lobby.

And even people who despise Wings Over Scotland should be alarmed by that.

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This site used to have a running joke about the number of times the Scottish media screamed “SNP CIVIL WAR!” whenever any two people in the party – one of whom would invariably be either Jim Sillars or Gordon Wilson – disagreed with each other about whether you should put the milk or the boiling water in a cup of tea first.

Well, here’s what a real one looks like.

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Scotland’s media is still unable to contain its outpouring of bitter, resentful rage over Alex Salmond’s exoneration by a jury on trumped-up sexual assault charges.

Flailing blindly in all directions it’s achieving little other than to embarrass itself, such as last night when Scotland On Sunday had to change its front page in a late panic. But the media’s toxic fury at being denied Salmond’s head on a pole has also led it to do something far, far more serious and reckless.

And every one of them knows exactly what they’ve done.

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It will come as little surprise to any observer of the Scottish media for the last decade that the trial of Alex Salmond is to continue indefinitely after the actual court case that cleared him of all charges.

With very occasional honourable exceptions, including some from rather unexpected sources, the Scottish press has been – even by its own spectacularly low standards – an absolute sewer for the past week. Wings has taken the decision not to link to any of the most disgusting articles, even as archives, because frankly in the current stressful situation none of us needs any extra poison in our headspace.

Scotland’s political journalists have been unable to contain their seething fury at being robbed of the head on a pike that they were all expecting and salivating about like Pavlov’s dogs. But scumbags are gonna scumbag, and that’s not news. What’s far more alarming is something in today’s papers that they didn’t write.

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Today a mostly-female jury drawn from the most Unionist city in Scotland and directed by a female judge delivered the only verdict it was credibly possible to reach on the (total absence of) evidence before it: that Alex Salmond was not guilty of any crime.

After two weeks hearing an assortment of lurid allegations from former friends and colleagues hidden behind cloaks of public anonymity, the jury – having been advised by the prosecuting counsel that they were the sole arbiters of fact – decided that there was no truth to them.

Since the two most serious charges, in particular, were both matters of the accuser’s word against that of the accused, and the two parties gave completely irreconcilable accounts of the facts (rather than competing interpretations of agreed events), it can only be the case that one side was lying absolutely, and the jury decided that it was the anonymous accusers who were doing so.

It remains to see whether there will be a legal reckoning for those lies. But more than one sort of reckoning will surely follow from these events.

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