Wings Over Scotland

When the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts died last month, the first of their songs that popped into my head, for no particular reason, was “Under My Thumb”, a mildly controversial 1966 album track the band never released as a single in the West.

Its most infamous place in history, though, is this.

Until Watts’ death I was only very broadly aware of the events at Altamont Speedway in 1969, a free festival at a racetrack near San Francisco at which four people died in scenes of malevolent chaos and which is widely regarded as the grim headstone of the hippy era.

But on seeing the extraordinary footage above for the first time on the day of Watts’ death – taken from “Gimme Shelter”, notionally the official movie of the show, although the first two-thirds of it are actually a mundane travelogue of the preceding tour dates – I did some proper reading up on it.

And as I did, a horribly familiar feeling started to unfold.

Read the rest of this entry →

Our cartoonist is still on holiday, but he’d never have beaten this for a joke anyway.

Read the rest of this entry →

All recorded indyref polling on the standard question, from here and here.

The picture (click to enlarge) tells the story more eloquently than we could.

Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.

Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.

It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.

Read the rest of this entry →

Holiday Boy is still “resting”, so here’s a laugh from nearly six years ago.

Hear the bang? See the spark? No, us either.

Our always-alert readers will probably have noticed that Nicola Sturgeon’s constant catchphrase this week has been how Yes supporters still need to “build the case for independence”, rather than actually do anything to achieve it.

But the thing is, she’s the leader of the SNP. Building the case for independence is literally her job, and she’s now been doing it for six and a half years. So how much progress have we made?

Read the rest of this entry →

Holiday Boy is on holiday. But remember in 2018 when Nicola Sturgeon was going to use next week’s election as a de facto referendum if the UK government hadn’t given her permission for one by now, readers?

It’s almost like you can’t ever believe a word she says.

From 1964:

How the times change, eh?

Hindsight is 20/20, readers, but perhaps we ought to have paid a little more attention to the article below back in 2015.

Because as the old saying goes: when people tell you who they are, believe them.

Read the rest of this entry →

We were reminded this week of the amount of stick we got when we wrote these words almost five years ago, right after the 2016 Holyrood election:

(The rest of our post-match analysis wasn’t too shabby either.)

But readers, we have to grudgingly admit: we’re only NEARLY always right.

Read the rest of this entry →

Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you back once again to the only event in politics that’s more frequent than a Scottish Labour leadership election.

Seems to come round sooner every year, doesn’t it?

Read the rest of this entry →

An extraordinary find by alert reader Ian Brotherhood in the archives.

(Click to enlarge.)

The paragraph at top right is a particular eye-catcher.