Wings Over Scotland

We thought yesterday’s Herald story – about a Scottish Government initiative designed to increase visitor numbers to island communities “backfiring” when it, er, increased visitor numbers to island communities – would be hard to top for this month’s SNP BAD Award, but when the paper grudgingly amended it a few hours later it seemed we’d have to look for a new contender.

Luckily we didn’t have long to wait.

Read the rest of this entry →

A brief note on the current futility of political commentary.

Remember that? Well, let’s see how it really works.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re not naturally disposed to sympathy for Tories, but it must be hellish being poor Ruth Davidson at the moment. The poor woman doesn’t know which way she’s facing from one minute to the next. Here she is less than a year ago:

Read the rest of this entry →

We were startled to see an old face make a bit of a comeback to the Scottish political scene this evening, when BBC Scotland dug up the former “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall to urge Scots not to do anything hasty in the aftermath of the UK’s Brexit vote.

And it led us, by a circuitous route, back to this.

We thought we’d just leave it here for the record.

Read the rest of this entry →

You’ll never guess what’s happened, readers.

At least they left a slightly more decent interval than with Michelle Mone.

Today we’re a boxing site, and that’s all there is to it.

We’ll be honest, readers, we’re actually quite happy that the Tories are now the lead Unionist party in Scotland. Because after four and a half years, we’ve pretty much run out of things to say about the epic, unquenchable stupidity of Scottish Labour.

The above tweets from the branch office’s former leader come from an exchange about a long-standing Glasgow charity that’s been forced out of its premises after the Labour-run city council hiked its rent by 400,000%. (No, that’s not a typo – we really mean FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND PERCENT.)

Of course, that Lamont should choose to blame the SNP for cuts coming down the line from the Tory government at Westminster (that only controls Scotland’s budget at all because Lamont and her colleagues campaigned for Scotland to remain in the UK) is no surprise.

But it’s the sheer jaw-dropping lack of self-awareness in that last line which lays bare the incredible inability of her pseudo-party to learn a single lesson from the revolution in Scottish politics that’s been going on for most of the last decade.

Read the rest of this entry →

The rise of the SNP has so bewildered the metropolitan commentariat that even almost a decade after the party won its first Scottish election pundits still barely know which way to face to confront it. A case in point can be found in today’s Times.

That was a quick switch.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’re looking forward to the publication of the Scottish Labour manifesto for next month’s election, which is due to be published on Wednesday, just eight days before the vote. We confidently anticipate that it will definitively clear up a few issues we’re still not absolutely sure of the branch office’s position on.

For a day or two, at least.

Read the rest of this entry →

With fears growing that hundreds of jobs may be lost in the Clyde shipyards as the UK government slowly backs away from the commitments made during the independence referendum campaign, Kezia Dugdale was full of righteous outrage last night.

But note how delicately that tweet is phrased. The clear implication – while not directly stated – is that only the Tories were responsible for the promises.

Is that the case, though?

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve noted on numerous occasions previously that one of this site’s prime functions is merely to remember things – to serve as a repository of fact which can be referred to when politicians or the media try to mislead people about what happened in the past. It was a thought we were struck by again on reading The Times this morning.

Because as we beheld Kenny Farquharson’s account of the SNP’s manifesto launch, and how its emphasis on the word “RE-ELECT” was unfamiliar and “very different” to their last Holyrood manifesto launch, we were sure that wasn’t how we recalled it.

So we checked.

Read the rest of this entry →

While we’re on the subject of Ruth “line in the sand” Davidson of the Ruth Davidson No Surrender To The SNP Anti-Referendum Party making U-turns, we thought we might remind you of another one, this time from rather more recent history than 2011.

Just nine months ago, apparently Ms Davidson’s view was that “it would be wrong for the Tories to stand in the way” of another referendum “if the SNP gets a democratic mandate from the public”.

Sounds like a firm, resolute commitment to democracy and the incontrovertible right of the people of Scotland to determine their own destiny. Stirring stuff. We approve.

Read the rest of this entry →