Wings Over Scotland

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones yesterday:

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones today:

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We weren’t exactly shocked to see the Scotsman still trying to flog the “evil cybernats” routine this morning with another story about Susan Calman, with the paper seizing on some comments from Fiona Hyslop as their excuse to keep the issue alive.

Today’s article, though, is noticeably more restrained than yesterday’s. It’s liberally sprinkled with disclaimers and caveats noting that the threats and abuse had been alleged, rather than reporting them as empirical facts. It even notes that Ms Calman has declined to comment further on the supposed events, implying that there were questions to be answered.

Then we got to the comments, and things started to get a bit weird.

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We’ve spent a fair bit of time over the course of this website’s existence documenting the multi-media witch-hunts that invariably arise in the Scottish media whenever some obscure and/or anonymous independence supporter on the internet says something slightly intemperate (or even just expresses an unpopular opinion).

We especially enjoy contrasting it against the way that the elected, taxpayer-funded representatives of major political parties can get away unremarked with comparing the First Minister to dictators and genocidal mass murderers (of the sort “Better Together” donors like to give hundreds of thousands of pounds to).

The vast difference in the amount of media weight given to abusive behaviour from British nationalists and that from the independence side (the infamous “cybernats”) has long been a feature of Scottish political debate, but over the last 12 hours the phenomenon has seen an intriguing new twist.

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From this morning’s Scotsman:

That devious BASTARD.

Johann Lamont, interviewed on the BBC last weekend:

“You can understand the desirability of people having access to medicines, but everybody knows there are tough choices being made now.” (10m 19s)

That’s the “leader of the Labour Party in Scotland”, there, seemingly equivocal on the principle of “people having access to medicines”. Nye Bevin must be proud.

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This is from an article in today’s edition of north-Scotland regional paper the Press & Journal about a poll they’ve just conducted among residents of Orkney and Shetland.

Flying in the face of Tavish Scott’s most recent attempts to bang on his battered old drum of how the Northern Isles might want to form their own independent nation/s if Scotland left the UK, the citizens of the two island groups delivered a crushing “No” to the notion, voting by a margin of almost 8:1 to stay part of Scotland.

Why, then, has the P&J chosen to illustrate the “No” section of its pie charts (meaning “No, we shouldn’t be separate from Scotland”) with the Union Jack of the UK, and the “Yes” section (meaning “Yes, we should be separate from Scotland”) with the Saltire? We’ve dropped them a line to ask.

We recently received the same letter from the Radio Times as many other people did, in response to our complaint about the magazine’s misrepresentation of respected Scottish historian Dr Fiona Watson last month. The problem related to an article about the film “Braveheart”, which made some deeply unpleasant implications easily read as saying the SNP were xenophobic racists encouraging anti-English violence.

The reply didn’t address the very specific issues we’d raised about what Dr Watson did or didn’t say, so we wrote back to the mag’s editor Ben Preston seeking clarification on a couple of important points. His reply is below.

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Ian Taylor, chief executive and president of Vitol, is the donor who just keeps on giving:

“Oil market dealers confirmed on Friday that a Syrian government tender on behalf of state oil company Sytrol for gasoline that closed on the market this week has been picked up by giant oil traders Trafigura and Vitol. Syria exports crude oil, but does not have the refining capacity to meet its domestic needs and relies on petrol imports.

On the same day US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time called for an international boycott of Syrian oil and gas products, and sanctions against its oil and gas industries as the best way of putting pressure on the regime to stop its murderous repression of protests there which began on March 15th and have cost upwards of 1700 lives.”

(Our emphasis, as usual.) To be honest, we hope “Better Together” don’t hand back Mr Taylor’s £500,000 donation. We imagine Yes Scotland will rather enjoy hitting them with this particular oil- and blood-soaked stick all the way to September 2014.

There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.

But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.

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So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?

After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.

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When we started this site we never imagined we’d find ourselves citing Aleister Crowley for anything, but it looks as though that strange and disturbing day has come.

We’ve had a theory for a while now that the expenses scandal of 2009 was a watershed moment in British politics, in the worst possible way. Practically the whole of the Westminster parliament was found to have perpetrated frauds against the taxpayer on a scale that would have seen benefit claimants given substantial prison terms, yet almost none were ever put in front of a court.

And despite the huge public outcry at duck houses and moat-cleaning and house-flipping and all the rest of it, when a General Election was called in 2010, the electorate trooped meekly into polling stations and re-elected almost every politician that had been caught with their greedy hands in the voters’ pockets.

Is it any wonder that those same politicians now think – probably correctly – that they can literally get away with just about anything? If we were them, we might be the same. After all, if sheep keep walking up to you when you’ve got shears in your hand, even if you keep gouging their eyes out with them, what else are you going to do?

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We like to jest at some of the more hysterical and ridiculous scare stories put out by Unionists about independence, but sometimes the joke just isn’t funny any more.

This week we listened to the “For A’That” podcast, which featured a range of bloggers including the pro-indy Andrew “Lallands Peat Worrier” Tickell and the rare beast that is a right-wing Green, in the form of new member and Liberal Democrat defector Douglas McLellan, once seen many moons ago around these here parts.

The last guest was ultra-loyal Lib Dem activist Caron Lindsay (above), tireless defender of Willie Rennie and front-bench policy in general. She provided much of the heat in the otherwise good-natured discussion, with a succession of furious tirades against the SNP, including several (eg on the “unanswered questions” about pensions in an independent Scotland) which could in fact have been easily cleared up with a few minutes’ use of the Wings Over Scotland search box.

One in particular, though, stood out as perhaps an all-time low for the No camp.

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