Wings Over Scotland

The reality-TV let’s say “personality” Kelly Given – who Wings readers previously met on a trip to New York for Tartan Week with a raft of SNP let’s say “celebrities” a couple of months ago – has been off on another nice holiday.

Last night she told both the viewers of BBC Scotland’s “Seven Days” that she’d just spent three weeks on an island in Greece, where apparently she was quite shocked to discover that the Mediterranean nation was hot in July.

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At least, we assume there was a sizeable current being passed through it, as little else could explain the visibly uncomfortable half-hour experienced by hapless Stonewall chair Iain Anderson with Beth Rigby last night, or the seemingly random changes every few seconds in his facial expressions, body language and accent.

(Just about the only constant, other than his sweating top lip, was the deeply irritating modern phenomenon of stupid people starting every sentence with the word “So…”.)

If you’re a connoisseur of vacuous, nervous awkwardness you’re in for a real treat. If you want to see a human being actually answering any questions with even the tiniest shred of coherence, pertinence or honesty, maybe give it a miss.

We’ve seen some hilarious demands for “unity” in the independence movement in the last couple of years, almost all of them from the most divisive figures ever to wave a wee plastic Saltire (Pete Wishart, Neil Mackay, Wee Ginger Dug etc etc).

But this effort from the SNP’s new airhead mascot takes the shortbread.

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Still wondering what Humza Yousaf’s going to say to the SNP’s pretend “conference” on independence strategy this coming Saturday? Well, wonder no longer, because this morning he told Sky News.

In other words, he’s waving the white flag and praying for a miracle.

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Some of you still won’t have seen them, er, we mean “this”:

While it may have been the funniest – and Joanna Cherry silently spoke for every sane person in the nation as it went on – remarkably it wasn’t even the stupidest or most offensive part of her speech to yesterday’s Parliamentary debate in Westminster Hall about the definition of “sex” in the Equality Act.

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Nicola Sturgeon has not been charged with any crime. Yesterday she was arrested, questioned and released without charge pending further investigation. We do not even know which specific suspected crime or crimes she was questioned in connection with, so it is manifestly impossible to meaningfully speculate on her innocence or guilt (save of course for the fact that all are innocent in the eyes of the law until proven otherwise, something Sturgeon herself often appears to forget).

Nevertheless, in Scotland the Contempt Of Court Act 1981 applies from the moment a person is arrested, as the country’s most senior lawyer and its official prosecution service were both keen to remind people yesterday in the clearest possible terms, and it applies equally whether you’re asserting someone’s guilt or their innocence.

So you need to be a really extra-special class of boneheaded numbwit to do this:

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Wings two days ago: “The SNP wants to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.

The SNP today: “We’re prepared to do a devo-max deal with Labour”.

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Even for Lorna Slater this is jaw-droppingly dumb:

It takes Olympic-class stupidity to publicly put a figure to how much your staggering incompetence has cost Scottish businesses in the middle of an economic crisis.

Either the Scottish Government knew the DRS wasn’t compliant and was hoping the UK government would shut it down, so that it could attempt to clumsily extract some political capital from “interference” (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds), OR it was so mindbogglingly inept that it genuinely intended the scheme to go into operation but failed to legislate it properly (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds).

In either case, any minister with responsibility for the gargantuan shambles should – quite obviously – be out on their ears before FMQs on Thursday in desperate hope of avoiding the government being sued by the affected firms. But the SNP/Green coalition has as little shame as it has ability or dignity, so expect the clown show to continue.

This is a wretchedly boring time to be writing about politics for a living, readers. Parliamentarians in Edinburgh and London haven’t technically checked out for the summer yet – Holyrood still has a month to go before taking two months off, while Westminster is currently having a couple of weeks off for “Whitsun”, whatever the hell that is, before coming back for a month and a half then sodding off until September.

But really they’re already at the “bringing board games in” stage of term, and both the elected chambers and the media already have their eyes on the beach, which probably explains why we’re being punted drivel like this.

Even if we must afford the graphics team some grudging kudos for the unicoo.

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It’s a bit disappointing to see an Italian-born man play into Mafia stereotypes.

“Nice indy movement you’ve got there. Be a shame if anything… happened to it.”

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When I was a boy at Balbardie Primary School in Bathgate in the mid-70s, football was banned in the playground. Of course we were all fitba-daft laddies, so we sought ways around the prohibition. Occasionally someone would bring in a tennis ball, but those were difficult to control in school shoes and also apt to fly over the wall of the outdoor toilet block if somebody caught one sweetly on the volley.

So most playtimes somebody would produce a tin of Pepsi or Irn-Bru or Cresta, chug the contents, stand the empty container on its end and stomp sharply on it, producing something more akin to an ice-hockey puck that would serve for our kickabout.

But even after being skelped and scudded around a concrete playground into stone walls for 20 minutes, that can was still in better shape at the end of our game than the one the SNP have been kicking down the road since 2016.

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