Wings Over Scotland

Incredible, really. Just one day after we accuse the SNP of trying to dodge its problems by hiding from them and censoring anyone who brings them up, this happens:

Plenty of SNP members, including the party’s former Trade And Industry spokesman, know this approach is untenable. It really is time the SNP started listening to them. A party that scurries away bleating in terror every time it’s threatened with the slightest scrutiny is plainly not capable of winning the hard fight for independence.

Some days it’s not even worth trying to get your jaw off the floor.

Yeah, THAT Neil Mackay.

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Bad news, readers. We’ve done some research, and it’s our grave duty to report to you that according to the evidence we’ve discovered, there’s a high statistical probability that everyone reading this website will one day die.

Luckily there’s a solution: we can all just commit suicide right now.

Wait – that’s a stupid idea, right?

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Let’s be clear about something straight away – we’re NOT about to write an article in defence of Tony Abbott. He IS a sexist, a misogynist and a climate change denier (and a homophobe), and as far as we can ascertain he’s NOT actually all that good at trade either. So even though the bar for improving the competence of the UK government is astonishingly low, we don’t want him in it any more than anyone else does.

But this is still an incredibly brainless thing to say:

And it explains a lot about what’s gone wrong everywhere.

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We suppose we should be happy to learn that Scottish Government ministers are at least still sometimes capable of understanding that men and women are different and there are times when it’s inappropriate for men to be in women’s spaces.

We just wish they didn’t keep reminding us of something so much.

We really hope the 27% of Scots who already think the Sun revolves around the Earth isn’t getting bigger.

Much as we might wish otherwise, we haven’t been able to help noticing other pro-indy websites doubling down on the “BOTH VOTES SNP, TRUST IN QUEEN NICOLA, THE 10TH MANDATE IS THE ONE THAT’LL WORK!” routine lately.

And however much we’ve tried to get people to grasp the seemingly-obvious fact that Boris Johnson is not looking at this debate from the same viewpoint we all are, reality doesn’t seem to be getting through to everyone yet.

So we thought we’d try a new tack.

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The BBC ran a completely insane story this week about a transman (ie a mentally ill woman) who almost died of kidney failure because she didn’t tell her doctors what sex she really was. The standout paragraph was probably the one pictured below, in which the atom-brained narcissist imbecile explained to a startled nation that apparently having a mental disorder also changes your physical biology:

(Also, y’know, “cute and awesome!” is definitely how men talk.)

But anyway. When we commission opinion polls, we’ve often noted that in any given poll you can expect around 5-10% of respondents to vote for even the most seemingly ridiculous options – either as a “joke”, or because they’re too dim to have understood the question, or whatever.

And last week we thought we’d put that to the test.

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Our regular weekend comedian Chris Cairns is off on a golf holiday this weekend (in fairness he’s only had four so far this year and it’s already August), but this is a sicker joke than anything he’s ever come up with.

We haven’t covered Martin Keating’s court case because we have some unanswered concerns about its transparency and communication, but it’s doing just fine without us, having passed £100,000 of its £155,000 funding target earlier today.

It’s bad enough that some random activist is having to do this and pay for it when the Scottish Government – who SHOULD have been doing it three years ago – sits with its thumb up its hole staring out of the window, but having their representatives actively attack and try to sabotage it is disgusting to a degree we can barely find words for.

We’ve had our fair share of doubts about stuff of late, but if Scottish independence achieved nothing more than putting a useless wage-stealing tosser like Pete Wishart out of a cushy Westminster job-for-life, it’d be worth doing for that alone.

Sometimes people are so stupid it’s legitimately scary. For example, all the Unionist politicians in Scotland who appear to genuinely think voters won’t notice that the recent exams catastrophe affected England (run by the Tories) and Wales (run by Labour) even worse than it did Scotland, and so they keep screaming for John Swinney’s head while having nothing to say about the even worse messes bursting all over their own parties’ respective jurisdictions.

(Esler misses the fact that the “deletions” were all actually retweets of a single tweet on the Scottish Conservatives which was deleted, but the point is the same.)

It genuinely boggles our mind that anyone, let alone a professional politician whose job it is to have their finger on the public pulse, could possibly imagine they’d ever get away with such utterly brainless naked hypocrisy, apparently believing that voters have memories less than 24 hours long and enjoy having their intelligence insulted.

(Incidentally, we can’t see any good answer to the exams problem. Either you have one year of massively artificially inflated grades, with all the tricky ramifications that presents further down the line, or you have a year of grotesque injustices to thousands of blameless individual students that are logistically impossible to remedy. The former is probably the lesser of the two evils, which poses the question of why the Scottish Government was too monumentally dim to see it coming and why it wasted a week defending the latter option before inevitably caving in and doing the sensible thing it was always going to have to do and should have just done in the first place.)

But it’s not just politicians.

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