Wings Over Scotland

To the surprise of most of those watching, including ourselves, the Court Of Session delivered its judgement immediately at the end of today’s hearing, after only the most cursory of conflabs between the three august panel members.

The short version is that the Scottish Government lost, and must now comply with Wings reader Benjamin Harrop‘s FOI request regarding evidence that was supplied to independent adviser James Hamilton during his inquiry into the unlawful investigation of false allegations against Alex Salmond.

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Apparently I’ve removed myself as the head of me for misbehaviour.

These are zany times in the independence movement, readers. Hold on.

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This is officially the most embarrassed to be Scottish we’ve ever been.

And we’re including both the 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony AND the time Craig Levein played 4-6-0 against the Czech Republic in that.

We have a government of clowns. Please, somebody, make it stop.

It’s not just the obvious tempting-fate part.

Yousaf himself has been demonstrating his unfitness for office ever since he’s had offices. But that’s not even the dumbest thing about that tweet.

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Maybe he thinks Ash Denham and Ash Regan are two different people.

Still, consistency, honesty, decency and integrity: no great loss.

We were interested to read about this earlier this evening:

Not least because it was the first we’d heard about it. At the time of writing this post we’ve still had no communication from the Standards Commission to alert us to the judgement, which is frankly a bit of a poor show. We might file a complaint with the Standards Commission about it, depending on whether we can be bothered to wait another year and a quarter for the result.

We are of course pleased that the odious Cllr Joji has finally been formally censured for her obnoxious behaviour, but frankly she’s gotten off very lightly.

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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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