Wings Over Scotland

We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!

At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.

And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.

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A timely reminder about how much 85% of British people (or to put that another way, English people) really value the rest of the UK.

“Lead us, Scotland, don’t leave us!” is going to be a pretty hard sell next time.

So it seems we opened quite a can of worms when we broke the story of the Scotland In Union donor leak last month. Yesterday saw the disturbing tale of police armed with battering rams seizing computers and phones from David Clews of right-wing Unionist group UK Unity, a former SIU member suspected of being the source of the leak.

For the record we have absolutely no idea if he’s the source or not (and we don’t know who is – the file was passed to us anonymously through a now-deleted email account), but however much of a mad zoomer someone might be we find ourselves rather uncomfortable with the deployment of such an excessive display of intimidatory police force in the defence of the interests of the wealthy establishment.

Clews might be a Unionist – and a fairly unpalatable one at that – but we very much doubt it was ever going to be necessary to smash his door down, and it’s striking to see the magnitude of the state’s reaction against one of its own the moment they might step out of line and do anything to displease either the titled and landed gentry who provide most of SIU’s money, or their loyal bootboys.

So having been subjected to a ridiculous arrest (and completely spurious, months-long confiscation of electronic equipment) ourselves last year for doing our job, we didn’t view the raid with quite as much schadenfreude as readers might expect.

But it wasn’t the most disturbing thing to arise from the story.

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Late last night in the House Of Commons saw one of the most significant votes in the history of UK constitutional politics. A group of Scottish Tory MPs voted to oppose an amendment which would have protected the central building block of Scottish (and Welsh) devolution – the principle that any powers not explicitly reserved are devolved – from the UK government’s attempted huge power grab under the cover of Brexit.

Those very same Scottish Tory MPs had previously pledged to stand up for Scotland’s interests regardless of loyalty to their party, and had repeatedly expressed their grave disappointment at the deeply unsatisfactory condition of the Withdrawal Bill.

Last night they could have fixed it by supporting the amendment (backed by every other Scottish MP right across party lines), which would have tipped the arithmetic and ensured its success. Instead they betrayed every voter in Scotland – including their own – by waving the bill through unamended and passing the buck to the unelected House Of Lords, which has no representatives from Scotland’s most popular party.

This morning, BBC Scotland led on the fact that it snowed a bit in Scotland in January.

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As if we hadn’t had enough controversy this week, it’s time to tackle the big issues.

The Scottish Sun’s been running stories for the last couple of days about the heresy that’s shortly going to be committed against Scotland’s most legendary iconic brand.

Penny-pinching Cumbernauld drinks giant AG Barr – which carefully avoided getting involved in the independence referendum so as not to upset anyone – is about to slash most of the sugar out of Irn-Bru despite there already being two low-sugar versions of it available, and the paper has called in a few consumers to decry the move.

But how does the wider public feel? Well, as it happens we’ve got poll data on that too.

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Yesterday we brought you news of the Scottish Mail On Sunday’s deep concern that the new Scottish budget might cost wealthy old people cashing in a £600,000 pension pot as one lump sum as much as £3,000 in extra tax. It was a heart-rending tale, but today we have one even more harrowing.

That’s our old Scotland In Union pal Merryn Somerset Webb writing in “the UK’s best-selling financial magazine” Money Week, and she was furious.

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Yesterday’s edition of the Scottish Mail On Sunday devoted most of a page to a weird column from Ruth Davidson (in which she appeared to believe that Alex Salmond was still the First Minister), crowing about the great deal that Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs have supposedly won for Scotland in this week’s coming budget.

The first alleged fruits of the deal were revealed today.

That tweet is quite disturbing in itself, because what it unmistakeably implies is that if Scotland had voted for more SNP MPs in June and fewer Tories, the UK government would have retaliated by spitefully punishing innocent war veterans.

And Poppy Scotland weren’t too pleased about being weaponised either.

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The Scottish Daily Mail runs this shock-horror outrage piece today:

Let’s zoom in a little closer on that, shall we?

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This is the former Labour UK government minister, socialist and internationalist Brian Wilson in the Scotsman today, gloating and crowing that the democratically-elected government of Catalonia has been deposed and imprisoned (the latest in a series of arrests and jailings of leaders of the independence movement) for seeking to discover the will of the Catalan people in a referendum, in accordance with the mandate they were elected on – an act Wilson somehow contrives to describe as “tyranny”.

Wilson, whose Twitter avatar is a picture of himself with Fidel Castro, asserts that the Spanish government’s literally fascist coup and oppression of its people is a “lesson for Scotland”. We doubt we’re alone in finding that view chilling.

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We’re not a Catalonian-politics website and we don’t even have an opinion on whether Catalonia should be independent, but sometimes it’s easier to understand the workings and failings of the media if you watch how it behaves on a subject you’re not directly and closely involved with. Last week was one of those weeks.

Below is a clip from yesterday’s edition of Sunday Politics Scotland. It features a man called José Rodriguez Mora, who was introduced to SPS viewers neutrally as simply an academic from Edinburgh University but was in fact instrumental in the creation of a stridently anti-independence Catalonian political party.

He was brought on to give voice to what has become the universal UK-media spin on events in Catalonia – that both sides are to blame, that the Catalan government was provocative and irresponsible to call an “illegal” referendum, and that the only way for the area to achieve independence is through the 1978 Spanish constitution, despite it expressly forbidding any such action and its cornerstone of existence (also known as the “Preliminary Title”) being “based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation”.

So in the striking absence of any useful information in the press, we thought we’d do a little digging and see how that might work.

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