Wings Over Scotland

For anyone who thinks it’s safe to wait until after 2021 for another indyref.

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I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.

Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.

I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)

They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.

Because the other way never ends anywhere good.

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We’re back in the archives again today, because there’s still no news. (The Herald is desperately trying to whip up outrage over trains arriving 61 seconds late, and David Torrance has finally turned up at the “OMG YES MOVEMENT SPLIT” party just as the last stragglers are heading home and the hosts are going to bed.)

And we’re particularly enjoying this one, for a whole list of reasons:

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In the continuing summer absence of any sort of Scottish politics news (the Sunday papers consist of Michelle Thomson understandably taking a swipe at the SNP in the Sunday Post, the Sunday Times spluttering in impotent fury that Michelle Thomson wasn’t prosecuted, and the Sunday Herald giving a glowing write-up to idiot Tory MSP Annie Wells while savaging sections of the Yes movement yet again – this time “older white men”), we thought you might enjoy a piece from the archives.

Discovered by an alert reader, this 1976 Times article features Labour MP for Basildon Eric Moonman discussing the seemingly-imminent prospect of Scottish devolution, to which he was implacably opposed and instrumental in defeating, ultimately leading to the collapse of a Labour government and the election of Mrs Thatcher.

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I went to “Dunkirk” at the cinema today. If you want to know what it’s like, just watch this trailer 40 times in a row and save yourself the £12.

It’s a poor movie, disjointed and aimless and curiously lacking in tension or narrative given the real-life subject matter. (It’s remarkably short on dialogue, which is lucky because you can barely make out any of what little script or story there is from behind the endlessly howling one-note airhorn of the soundtrack. It’s a bit like someone filmed an IKEA assembly manual in live action during a Formula 1 race.)

But I couldn’t help thinking that part of the reason it was so unengaging was because it felt akin to watching a boxing match between two fighters you don’t like. If Mike Tyson took on Tyson Fury, would you cheer for the rapist or the anti-Semitic homophobe?

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And no, we’re not talking about Ruth Davidson living it up at Fingers Piano Bar. Kezia Dugdale tweeted this today:

Which would be a little bit like us gloating that Andy Murray was rubbish at tennis on the grounds that he was knocked out of Wimbledon this week.

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So this is a thing that happened yesterday:

Because, as ever, Scottish Labour are absolutely certain that voters are morons.

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Apologies in advance about this, folks, but it’s driving us mad. We got into a Twitter argument with some Tory balloon last night and this morning, and to cut a long story short it got us looking at the 1951 UK general election result.

History records it as a Tory majority, securing just over half of the Parliamentary seats (321 of 625) and forming the government under Winston Churchill despite narrowly losing the popular vote to Labour (48% to 48.8%).

But if you examine the result in the House Of Commons Library the numbers don’t add up, and we can’t figure out why.

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Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this.

Because we’ve been telling you it was coming for half a decade.

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There’s no particular reason to post this today, other than that it’s only come to light this week and today happens to be the 20th anniversary of the article below.

While it’s often said (mainly by nationalist types) that the Scottish Parliament and its electoral system were specifically designed to prevent the SNP from coming to power and holding an independence referendum, there’s been very little in the way of explicit evidence to back that statement up.

The 27 April 1997 issue of the Scottish Sun, though, had it in spades.

So we thought we should save it from Twitter’s fleeting attention span for posterity.

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An alert reader got in touch with us this evening to tell us that they’d been clearing out an old hard drive and found an interesting web page they’d saved from several years ago. They asked if we’d like to see it.

“Sure”, we said. “Let’s have a look.”

It turned out that they’d had an exchange several years ago with Kezia Dugdale on her old (now deleted) blog, where she tended to be a bit more candid than she is now, and were so startled by an answer she’d given them that they’d felt the need to keep it.

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Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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