Wings Over Scotland

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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The Radio Times was funded by the licence fee until the government sold it in 2011. We don’t remember receiving a cheque for our share. The extract below is from a feature about William Wallace in this week’s edition.

Let’s read that carefully. “Braveheart” has allegedly been “a gift to Alex Salmond and the SNP”. In what context? The context of “fuelling anti-English sentiment”. There’s no mention of winning elections, no mention of making people feel more positive about Scotland, no ambiguity whatsoever – the specific end to which the film has served the SNP, according to Dr Watson, is “the justification of anti-English sentiment”, and the associated perpetrating of violent assaults on young children.

We’ll run that past you again – the SNP love “Braveheart” because it helps them in their cynical aim of fostering xenophobia and getting little kids beaten up.

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Frighteningly, Wings Over Scotland is fast approaching its 1,000th post (likely to happen sometime next week). Sometimes, for unknown reasons, someone will tweet a link to an old story I’d forgotten I’d written, and I’ll click to see what it was and get enraged as if I’d never seen it before and was just discovering it now.

Today was one of those days.

Remember how Unionists endlessly cite World War 2 as the definitive example of great British “togetherness”? Turns out they might be over-egging that one a bit. From today’s Scottish Daily Express (print edition only):

Of course, that was a long time ago. Things are different now.

We already know that Labour, particularly in Scotland, have no policies on just about anything. But in the light of the past week’s glut of abstentions, we decided to see if we could find out if the party had any remaining principles either. The results were startling, by which we mean not startling in the slightest.

Below are just a few of the votes that Labour has abstained on, at both Westminster and Holyrood, in recent memory. What, we ponder rhetorically, is the point of having an Opposition that doesn’t ever actually oppose anything?

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We’re only just now getting round to watching last night’s special edition of Newsnight Scotland. It’s off to a cracking start. Great work there, BBC Scotland graphics team.

Well, what a curious day this is shaping up as. As we scoured our Twitter feed in vain after the bewildering media blackout on the workfare vote, we also discovered that “Better Together” has been running around half the internet trying to censor a satirical video. To cut a long story short, you can download a copy of the video by right-clicking on the image below and choosing “Save As…” or “Save Link As…”.

(NB: Don’t left-click, as it will attempt to stream it and fail.)

We invite the No campaign to see if they can have it pulled from this site.

But that wasn’t the end. As people started to read our story on the workfare motion, we began to get tweets and comments questioning the quote we’d used, as it didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the article on the website. Confused, we went and had a look, and sure enough the original version had vanished, replaced by something much shorter and far more innocuous.

Luckily this isn’t our first time with internet censorship. At the time of writing there’s still a cached version of the original, and when that disappears you can read it here.

We’re not quite sure what’s happening today, but we don’t like it.

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An alert viewer directs us to the Scottish FA’s “Supporter Registration Page”. Click the image below for a bigger picture, but a much smaller sense of self-worth.

We have a vague nagging sensation that something seems to be missing from that list of nationalities, but we just can’t quite put our finger on it. We’re sure it’ll come to us.

The usage of Nazi terminology to refer to any actions of a democratically-elected UK government is nearly always an absurd and unhelpful exaggeration. Today, however, one such analogy is absolutely literally justified.

The words “Arbeit Macht Frei” were emblazoned, usually in iron, over the gates of numerous concentration and extermination camps in 1930s and 1940s Germany, most infamously Dachau and Auschwitz. The phrase is usually rendered in English as “work makes you free”, though a more precise translation of the first word is “labour”.

That the same exhortation is used in Britain in 2013 by The Salvation Army tells you all you need to know about the ideological climate of the modern United Kingdom.

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We haven’t studied the McCluskey report in detail, and we’re awfully tempted – after 16 months of scrutinising the many abysmal failings of Scotland’s media – to cynically assume that if it’s got them so uniformly up in arms it must be a good thing. But we’ll try to resist the kneejerk reaction.

For now we’ll merely pass comment on a very odd piece against the proposals by Iain Macwhirter in the Herald, ostensibly listing reasons “Why Scotland should be afraid”.

“George Galloway called Tony Blair a murderer – but he won’t be able to say that in print or online. Some of the descriptions of Brian Souter, during the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign against the promotion of homosexuality in schools, would be actionable, as would many of the remarks made by his supporters. Feminists who say silly things like ‘all men are rapists’ could be in the dock , as would loud-mouths like Ray Winstone who said he was ‘raped by taxes’.”

Um, and these are supposed to be BAD things, are they? If those are really the potential consequences of the report’s implementation, if such counter-productive and divisive and idiotic debasement of intelligent discourse would suddenly become a punishable act, then sign us up right now. Because given that we currently live in a country where this can happen, we’re not sure we’ve got anything to lose.

The media (and some of the more gullible elements of the blogosphere) recently got itself into a lather about Douglas Alexander’s latest contribution to the independence debate – excellently rebutted by novellist and playwright Alan Bissett – which presented his vision of a post-referendum Scotland that voted No to independence.

Here’s an alternative picture. But unlike the typical “Better Together” scare story, these are not fabricated fantasies. Many are happening right now, while others are merely under discussion and in preparation.

This is what you’re voting for if you vote No.

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