Wings Over Scotland

We’re sure you all read this story last night.

Via another source we’d known it was coming for a few hours and were all set to follow it up, but in fact Daniel Sanderson of the Telegraph did a pretty thorough job on it in a comprehensive piece, even listing all the times the “prepared” civil servants had had to go back and “clarify” “errors” in their evidence even after dozens of hours of practice and £55,000 worth of “training” in how to not quite tell the truth under pressure.

It was hard not to wonder how abysmal their performances would have been if they’d only had – say – £30,000 worth of coaching at your expense.

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We know we’ve given you quite a lot to digest already this year, readers. But spare a thought for us – trying to keep on top of all the fast-moving developments in Scottish politics in the first 11 days of 2021 has been rather like trying to tunnel our way out of an avalanche while it was still happening.

We’ve had a bit of job even finding a spare moment to squeeze the cartoons in. But today’s task looked like one of the most challenging of all.

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You know everything’s definitely going swimmingly for Nicola Sturgeon when the white knight riding heroically to her defence is… [checks notes twice] Duncan Hothersall.

We’re very excited to find out what our secret plan is.

(We must apologise to readers at this point for the late arrival of this week’s typically splendid Chris Cairns cartoon, which in fact arrived entirely on time from our hard-working crayonist but which we’ve put on hold for a bit while we cover last night’s major breaking story and its immediate aftermath. Now on with the show.)

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Just for old times’ sake, during last night’s attempted coup in America we took a little dip back into the Yoonstream, the very special place on social media where the most deranged of Scotland’s Unionists hang out.

It didn’t disappoint.

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We know that the 5th of January is unusually early to be giving out annual awards, but this is going to be pretty much impossible to beat, so God bless the P&J for giving us all a chuckle in these dark times.

Let’s just quickly check on that “expert”.

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Before we got distracted by a(nother) completely gratuitious and unprovoked personal attack from a pro-indy blogger yesterday, this is what we’d been going to write about.

So since the SNP haven’t even bothered themselves to issue some sort of half-hearted token response to Boris Johnson’s declaration yesterday that he wouldn’t contemplate a second indyref before 2055, we might as well while away a few moments analysing the current state of Scottish Labour thinking just to cheer ourselves up.

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Hoo boy. Here we go again.

So, for the historical record: I have no belief whatsoever, earnest or otherwise, that I can get rid of Nicola Sturgeon in the next four months.

I’m an idiot with a website. I have no power. I haven’t been elected to anything and I’m not the commander of an army. Information to which I’m privy would get me put in jail if I published it, and would in itself have no power to remove Nicola Sturgeon anyway. The only people who can bring that about between now and May are Sturgeon herself or, collectively, the Scottish Parliament.

This site has for some time called for Sturgeon to resign because it is our belief that she’s going to have to anyway, on account of events over which we have no control or influence. Because of that it would be the responsible and conscientious thing for her to quit early enough that the SNP/independence movement had a chance to deal with the issue of her succession and regroup in plenty of time for this May’s election.

The remaining window of opportunity for that to happen is now getting very narrow. And the enemies of independence will be beside themselves with delight about it.

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Yesterday we noted that rational people arrive at decisions about things based on the facts, not the personalities of who else might support or oppose those things. But in the interests of balance, allow us to present the counterpoint.

Yesterday the SNP’s defence spokesman at Westminster cited the position of French National Front leader Marine Le Pen when arguing with someone who suggested that an independent Scotland should leave NATO.

As it happens, we agree with McDonald on NATO membership. It would be a pointless folly and an exercise in self-destructive virtue-signalling to leave an organisation which is willing to defend Scotland militarily for free because of its strategic location, and it would be extremely unpopular with the Scottish public (including SNP voters), no matter how much those on the left might wish otherwise.

His reasoning above, however, is a wretched embarrassment.

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Dr Tim Rideout is one of the most serious and respected people in the Yes movement and the SNP. As convener of the Scottish Currency Group he’s presently engaged in trying to solve the party’s self-inflicted weakness over its lack of a coherent currency policy, and he’s sufficiently highly rated by SNP members that earlier this month he was elected to the party’s Policy Development Committee.

So you might think he was entitled to a view on, well, development of policy.

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If this site seems to spend most of its time being angry at the SNP these days, that’s because we are. And a large part of that is because there’s very little that hacks us off more than people insulting our intelligence.

Smith’s tweet is just a crassly offensive flat-out lie. This week’s vote is NOT about “EU membership”. The United Kingdom hasn’t been a member of the EU since 31 January. We’ve already left and there’s no going back. The vote is about whether we leave with a sliver of a trade deal slightly reducing the self-inflicted harm, or the total catastrophe of no deal at all, and it’s just crushingly embarrassing for all concerned that Smith thinks so little of his own supporters as to believe he can “frame” it otherwise.

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There was a time, readers, when we’d have bothered ourselves to dig out the whole series of headlines and links for this.

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Oh just shut up you useless waste of space.

He DOESN’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK. You can bleat at him for a thousand years and he won’t listen. You gave him his election and he has a majority and England has chosen its fate and there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop them dragging us down with them because you’ve wasted the last four years whining about it instead of doing the thing we elected you to do, which is put us in charge of our own future forever.

Now either get off your worthless coward’s arse and do the only thing that’s actually in your power – a plebiscitary election – instead of grandstanding around the world stage achieving absolutely sod-all except getting your face in the press again, or get out of our damn way and let someone who can do the job take over.

(PS that also includes the job of handling the pandemic, which you’re making a pig’s arse of too, but gosh, doesn’t everyone love how telegenically you’re presenting the thousands of needless deaths? New Zealand has had just TWENTY-FIVE with near enough the same population, because their leader had the courage to make the tough calls you failed to because the Selfie Queen can’t bear to be unpopular.)

And no, we haven’t been drinking. Not a drop. We’ve just had enough.