Wings Over Scotland

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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I made the mistake of reading this on the BBC website today.

And I don’t think I’ve ever hated humanity more than I do right now.

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We’ve had no takers from any Nicola Sturgeon loyalists for this yet, so let’s narrow our focus a bit and see if we can get some joy from the payroll vote.

The quote pictured below is an absolutely unequivocal statement, with no qualifiers or conditions, made during and with full knowledge of a major peak in the COVID-19 pandemic. The halfway point of the current Scottish Parliament is 9 November 2023.

So: I bet Pete Wishart £5,000 that he’s a liar.

I have the money, and on the £100K-a-year-plus-expenses wage he’s been stealing for most of the last 20 years (and let’s not forget the juicy £50,000-a-year Westminster pension he’s built up over two decades of totally failing to deliver the only thing he’s ever been elected to do), we damn sure know that HE has the money.

My bet is simply that there will NOT be a second indyref on or before that date.

Please, everyone reading this with a Twitter account, tweet this to Pete Wishart until he takes five seconds off from attacking real independence campaigners and gives us all his answer, and let’s see if he’s prepared to put a tiny little fraction of his money where his endlessly bloviating mouth is.

Because if he isn’t, we’ll all know why.

Slacky The Holiday Boy is once again on his monthly two-week break, so it falls to us to try to amuse you on a Saturday morning with an image of some sort. Unfortunately very little funny is happening in Scottish politics, so all we’ve got is this.

Yes, the two most popular politics websites in Scotland at the moment are one that’s been retired for three months and one whose author is currently in prison. All hail that new media, eh?

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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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Misogynist racist midget Patrick Harvie is furious this week, which is always nice.

It seems he really doesn’t like it up ‘im.

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The SNP collected slightly over 1 million list votes in Thursday’s election, which nevertheless elected just two list MSPs because SNP voters care about power for the SNP rather than about independence, and chose to let dozens of Unionist MSPs get seats rather than other pro-indy parties.

But the bigger tragedy is that one of those two was Emma Roddick.

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Our sincerest congratulations go to The National on what by our count is their 250th “INDY IS COMING SOON!” front page. A real landmark.

Any readers pointing out that there was a “pro-indy majority and mandate for indyref2” after the 2016 Holyrood election, and yet here we are five years later without indyref2 having actually happened even though the Parliament voted for it twice, can only be MI5 Unionist plants and must of course be shunned and vilified and ideally put in prison if at all possible.

We’re so excited we’re already looking forward to the May 2026 version.

It’s pretty stark when you see it laid out like this.

In just four months, the SNP – because if you aggressively assert sole ownership of a political campaign, there’s nobody else you can blame when it goes south – have turned a 10-point lead for independence into a seven-point lead for the Union with the same polling company.

And while that’s pretty brutal in itself, it’s not even the real fly in the ointment.

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“They don’t even live in Scotland!”  

It really is quite uncanny how similar some SNP supporters have become to the most frothing, abusive blood-and-soil Yoons of 2014. But we can live with this company:

And let’s make something very clear.

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At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.

Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.

So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.

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Fresh from being embarrassed over a ridiculous smear story this week about someone complaining to the police about the use of a well-known political phrase by a Wings commenter, Tom Gordon of the Herald went on quite the attack yesterday.

The thread, which contains a number of basic factual errors about events*, continued for several more tweets all generally rubbishing our scoop from Friday afternoon and suggesting that no proper journalist (“the rest of us”) would have run the story.

So he must be feeling quite left out this morning.

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