Wings Over Scotland

We expected nothing better from Mhairi Hunter, of course, a once-decent human being corrupted by Nicola Sturgeon into an unthinking party drone.

But the reaction of the First Minister of Scotland to Ash Regan’s defection to Alba today is a sour, ugly and childish thing that would have been unworthy of the leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, never mind a serious grown-up in a position of power.

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The average prison term for rape in Scotland is just under seven years. So we really don’t want to think about what Andrew “Amy George” Miller did to the poor young girl he abducted to get 20. (Indeed, strictly speaking 28.)

Miller wasn’t charged with rape, the 11-year-old was described as “safe and well” when the police found her and she was missing for just over one day. Miller also entered a guilty plea. So our blood runs cold at the thought of what must have happened in those 27 hours to nevertheless attract such a huge sentence, and we hope never to know.

But there are some things we DO want explained.

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We thought this was overdue an update. It’s got about 16 new front pages on it, one whole new row and a handful of newly-rediscovered replacements. It really is worth taking a few minutes to peruse it properly (click on the pic to enlarge it) to get the full effect of eight wasted years of deja vu disappointment.

It’s not even The National’s fault. They’re a business, they’re simply trying to sell a few papers to a diminishing audience of endlessly gullible eejits. The real fault lies with the halfwitted SNP members who just keep on doggedly failing to learn a single lesson, and repeatedly vote to carry on doing what they know doesn’t work and never will.

Ach weel, as they used to say.

The writing, we mean. Because it’s not until you see it baldly written down in black and white that it really hits you how insane it is.

The SNP has 44 MPs now, and has not managed to enter independence negotiations.

Winning 29 seats would represent a LOSS of 15, or more than a third.

And they’re about to stand up in front of voters and insist that that would somehow compel the UK government to hand over what they’ve been flatly refusing since 2016.

(It’s all pretty academic anyway, obv, as we’ll be amazed if they get double figures.)

The very last shred of credibility has left the building, readers.

Six years ago today.

The mass uprisings will be any minute now, we’re sure.

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The greatest intellectual weakness of the independence movement is its attitude towards Trident, and trying to reason with people about it (whether readers or other independence activists) is consistently one of the most frustrating aspects of writing Wings, because nuclear disarmers and Unionists are equally impervious to logic on the subject.

The UK’s nuclear “deterrent” – or as it was more accurately and memorably described by the former Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron commander Air Commodore Alastair Mackie, “a virility symbol, like a stick-on hairy chest” – is the greatest gift to a future Scottish independence negotiating team imaginable.

The rest of the UK gets a lot of economic and infrastructural benefits from Scotland, like water and energy, but ultimately it’s not massively bothered about those. Water is not yet a critical area and energy can be sourced elsewhere, and in any event Brexit shows us that the UK is more than willing to do itself enormous harm in the service of ideological political goals.

But Trident is a whole different kettle of sweaty underwater men.

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Last night a by-election hustings was held in Rutherglen to which all 14 candidates were invited to hear and answer questions from the electorate on women’s issues. The SNP, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates all declined to attend. But the SNP, at least, was represented at the event.

Or at any rate, just outside it.

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Tonight an SNP MP tweeted this:

“Desperately”, eh?

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The key word here is “DEMAND”.

Because we’ve heard that one before, haven’t we?

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I’ve known my mate Chris since I was five years old and we lived next door to each other in a council scheme in Bathgate. He’s a grand lad, the sort of Rangers fan that you can introduce in polite company, a hardworking, small-c-conservative successful business owner who’d go out of his way to help you and has a few SNP councillors in his social circle.

He isn’t the least bit political. In 2014 he was a soft No whose vote was narrowly tipped by the fact that his company did almost all of its business with English clients and he feared losing them to red tape (and, ironically, English nationalist sentiment) after indy, but after the Brexit referendum he was leaning very much more Yes.

The SNP’s staggeringly incompetent rule since then blew that chance and has pushed him further back into the No camp than he ever had been before, but last night he texted me “can’t believe this actually went to print and came through our door today”.

I can’t say I blame him.

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In the end, it only took 12 hours.

Bless his painfully-predictable cotton socks.

But hey, bold use of “leading”.

Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea of how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.

(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month.)

For around 40 years of my life, I had an easy one-word answer to being asked if I was in favour of independence for Scotland, and that answer was “Yes”. If you’d pushed me to expand, I’d have said “Yes, obviously“.

Even though my dad was employed by the SNP leader of the time – in his non-SNP capacity as a business owner – politics wasn’t discussed in our house. (These were the 1970s, so there wasn’t a vast amount of discussion full stop.) But I was raised, basically by default, with the view that Scotland was a country.

Of course it was a country. It had its own dialect and an identifiable culture, both things personified to my young self by Oor Wullie and The Broons, and our weekly visits to my granny’s wooden bungalow in a wee ancient village near Cumbernauld that may as well have been Auchenshoogle (weirdly, sometimes “Auchentogle”).

It had national football and rugby teams. It had a flag. Why would it be any less of a country than Germany or Italy or Holland or Brazil or Argentina? (My knowledge of geography was primarily World Cup-based.)

So as soon as I had even the vaguest notion of the concept of politics – probably around the age of 7 or 8, during the Three Day Week – it seemed straightforwardly axiomatic to me that it should be independent. There wasn’t even a thought process, it was just mad and unnatural to think otherwise, like believing the sea was orange. Countries run their own affairs, right? And that was it for the next 40-odd years.

(Post-2007, when I started to seriously examine the idea, the feeling only solidified.)

But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer is different. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.

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