Wings Over Scotland

Several of today’s Scottish newspapers report on a marginal increase in the number of homeless people in Scotland, and in particular – for some reason – those who’ve slept rough for at least one night in the three months before declaring themselves homeless.

Things become a little clearer when you see that the reported stats are courtesy of “research by Scottish Labour”, who’ve scoured the document to cherry-pick the worst-sounding numbers in order to blame “Tory and SNP austerity”, etc etc.

That weirdly specific stat for rough sleepers has risen by 10% over two years, although this year’s increase was only 1% and overall homelessness is only up by less than 1% over the same two-year period.

But all credit to Labour – it’s only taken them two months to come up with that number (which is the second line of Table 2 in the statistics). Because the figures were actually released – and reported – in the middle of June.

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November 2009: “at the end of the day the banks will be paying money to the British people and not the other way round”.

Shall we take a look through the arched-eyebrows window, readers?

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Holiday Boy is taking slacking to a new extreme to mark the onset of spring, and we’re sad to inform you that there’ll be no Cairnstoons on Wings for another couple of weeks while our intermittent satirist rearranges his Fabergé eggs or something.

Entirely by coincidence, yesterday we were doing some overdue admin, and as we filed away some previous bits of crayon-work we couldn’t help but be struck by the prescience of a few cartoons from various times, 2013 in particular.

So just in case anyone had forgotten (attention spans are short these days), here’s some of the insight we’re all currently missing.

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You’ve got to give them credit for audaciously shameless timing.

3 April 1989

3 April 2018

Still, though 29 years (and counting) is quite a while, it’s not even nearly a record.

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There’s an interesting article on the Holyrood Magazine website today with some fascinating background details about how Scottish (and Welsh) devolution came into being almost 20 years ago, so we thought you might like to see this piece from the time, not least because we suspect it might also be the first recorded citation of the nonsensical concept of the “UK single market”.

(Click for readable size.)

It’s remarkable how seamlessly much of it, especially the last section (from the giant “D”) would still work today with the word “devolution” replaced with the word “independence”. But we find it hard to disagree with Sir John’s conclusion:

“Nor would devolution truly give more powers to the Scottish people. Only independence would do that.”

Preach, brother.

Remember that time, barely over a decade ago, when the readers of the Scottish Daily Express came out for independence despite national polls only showing support in the 20s, the paper sold over 80,000 copies a day (now just 38,000) and Severin Carrell of the Guardian reported that it was about to adopt independence as its official position?

(Which we don’t think ever actually happened.)

Because nothing is weirder than Scottish politics.

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Particularly alert readers may have experienced a pang of deja vu at yesterday’s story highlighting media misrepresentation of polling figures.

We can’t imagine why.

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…for the relationship between the four “partner” nations of the UK presented itself at the weekend when BBC anchorman John Inverdale asked the Scottish rugby pundit and former international Andy Nicol “what does this do for self-belief from a Scottish perspective, Andy?”

Which was clearly pretty ironic in itself:

But alert readers may recall how that “epitome of Better Together” worked out.

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After Scotland’s rugby team sent proud Edward (Jones)’s army homeward with some well-skelped erses from Murrayfield yesterday, it seemed like an opportune moment to reflect on this from just 12 years ago.

The full story is below.

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It’s still thin, thin gruel for Scottish politics in the press – everyone’s desperately trying to pretend income tax is a story again today – so while we do some research it’s back to the vaults for more ironic historical chuckles we go.

Just the one time, though, apparently.

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Since we’re talking about sectarianism and bigotry this week, we’ve got you a 1998 Scotsman piece on the subject. The full piece is below, but our favourite lines come from Scotland In Union stalwart and noted Twitter zoomer “Professor” Tom Gallagher.

Wow. And the Ku Klux Klan’s distinctiveness stems from their white identity, we guess, although perhaps they have misgivings about some aspects of lynching black people and setting fire to crosses on their lawns.

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