Wings Over Scotland

To mark today’s events, a look back at more innocent times.

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For much of last year, this site advocated a rational but unpopular position – namely that the SNP, which at the time held the balance of power in the UK parliament, should offer to support Theresa May’s soft-Brexit deal in exchange for the transfer of powers to hold a second independence referendum.

The logic was clear – nothing was ever going to stop Brexit from happening, but passing May’s deal would save the UK from the catastrophe of a no-deal. Everyone would be a winner – England and Wales would get what they voted for, Remain-voting Northern Ireland would get special terms that kept it in the EU in all but name, and Scotland would get the chance to stay in the EU as an independent nation.

“But no!”, everyone screamed at us. “We can’t possibly do any sort of deal with the Tories or we’d be electorally crucified and lose the referendum, you idiots!”

Record scratch, jump-cut to the present day.

[Pause for long, weary sigh.]

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From 2016 (and another classic in the “missing words” category).

We were keen to read the article, obviously.

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Chilling indeed, 1992 Sunday Times. Chilling indeed.

We were looking for something else this afternoon, but accidentally found this:

Just two weeks before the last Holyrood election, widely-respected analysts Weber Shandwick had put together a prediction of how the results would pan out. Just for a bit of fun, let’s compare it to the reality.

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We were rummaging around semi-aimlessly in the vaults last night, readers, and we were rather startled to come across this:

Shows what YOU lot know, eh?

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BBC Scotland, then and now.

We’re pretty sure they used the same “separating rival groups” phrasing at Tianenmen Square too, but we’d have to go and check. Meanwhile, here’s what really happened.

We’ve noticed a fair few Unionists this week proudly claiming that an independent Scotland would have been too broke to survive the coronavirus pandemic. They might not listen to our many and comprehensive rebuttals, but maybe they’d heed the words of Tony Blair, from way back in October 1987:

The sliding doors of history, there, readers. When Unionists tell you Scotland is feeble, remember who made it that way, and never forget how it could have been.

We thought readers might be interested in a small update on yesterday’s post. As we told you, Graham Shields – the Head of Strategic Communications and Engagement at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service who fobbed off our complaint about newspapers enabling the identification of sexual assault accusers – was the editor of the Evening Times until he was let go in December 2017.

Which is just two months after this happened:

So you’d think that if anyone knew what jigsaw identification looked like, he would.

We had a brief but semi-enlightening debate on Twitter with some daft young idiot from Scottish Labour this morning, which culminated in his desperately clutching at votes for the Tories and Lib Dems last month as somehow representing a victory for Labour.

Readers can pass an idle moment by identifying all the obvious logical flaws in that tweet for themselves, but it did lead us to a striking realisation, which we instinctively knew was true but still had to double-check because it seems so ridiculous.

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Over the last few days, for want of anything more interesting happening in Scottish politics, we’ve been reviewing some of the entertainingly fluid criteria by which Unionist politicians used to assert that Scotland could supposedly achieve independence. But we hadn’t seen this one before:

A view apparently “almost universally shared among English Tory backbenchers” back in the late 1980s was that independence could be won by the SNP securing a majority of Scottish MPs at not one but two successive UK general elections.

Given that that line has now been crossed in THREE Westminster elections in a row, we’re all agog to find where Boris Johnson will move the goalposts to in his keenly-awaited response to the Scottish Government’s second Section 30 request, which he’s due to deliver any minute now.

We’ve never been able to actually confirm the oft-cited “quote” from Margaret Thatcher suggesting that the SNP winning a majority of Scottish seats at a UK election would constitute a mandate for independence, but here’s a verified more recent one from a then-serving Conservative PM.

“[John] Major has made it clear that a majority of SNP MPs after an election would serve as a mandate to begin negotiations for separation. There are no plans to hold a referendum”, said former Thatcher minister and party chairman Norman Tebbit a few months before the 1997 election.

It was a position the Tories held right up to 2010 – the last election at which the SNP didn’t win a majority of Scottish seats, at which point the goalposts magically shifted. Now, of course, the rule is that a majority of MPs doesn’t count, but you also can’t have a referendum.

Scotland is a prisoner without hope of parole. Time for a breakout.