Wings Over Scotland

It’s nice to see the British media (and perhaps, if we might be allowed to dream for a moment, the law) catching up with Michelle Mone.

It’s such a shame nobody did any proper investigative journalism into what a crooked, venal chancer she is before now – seven years ago or even four years ago, say – or the country might have been saved a few billion quid. Ah well, you live and learn, eh?

Stop us if you think you’ve heard this one before, readers.

Because you won’t be wrong.

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Such a tragic loss.

So very very sad.

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While this site remains mothballed, it’s nice to keep a steady trickle of traffic going just in case it ever needs to spring back to life, eg if someone actually interested in independence suddenly somehow becomes leader of the SNP again.

So we thought it might be fun to just briefly link to some old articles as and when they became topical once more, and as luck would have it tomorrow is such an occasion.

Because that’s when the SNP will launch the first of a series of new papers outlining the First Minister’s “vision” of independence by waffling on about how it would be a jolly good thing, in the unlikely event that she ever got off her extremely well-paid arse and achieved it.

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This was overdue an update. Two extra rows now added.

(Click for full size image with legible dates. Landscape version here.)

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15 years ago this week (today if you’re counting strictly by date, Thursday if you want to go with election days) the SNP came to power in Scotland for the first time ever. The media operating in Scotland is full of retrospectives and polls on the period, but as usual they’ve missed the real story, as a reader pointed out to us a few days ago.

So for old times’ sake, let’s do their job properly for them one more time.

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We’ve observed that over the last few days a number of Unionists, led by tuba-honking dunderhead Blair McDougall (the man who turned a 30-point No lead into a 10-point one, who lost Labour 5000 votes when he stood in East Renfrewshire in 2017 on the basis of being the guy who saved the UK – trailing in an embarrassing 3rd in a seat where Jim Murphy had once won over 50% of the vote – and who is probably more responsible than any other individual for the utter destruction of Scottish Labour as a political force), have revived the ancient “Better Together” scare story about pensions in an independent Scotland.

So as a small public service, we republish below this article from November 2016 on the subject, which remains an accurate and up-to-date summation of the reality.

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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.

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

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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.

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