Wings Over Scotland

Wings Over Scotland has been monitoring the BBC’s coverage of Scottish politics for over 11 years now, readers, and other than The Nick Robinson Incident we’re honestly struggling to remember seeing anything worse than this.

The Corporation’s “coverage” of Ash Regan’s campaign launch for the SNP leadership election ran for roughly seven minutes. And we suppose we should be grateful that it did at one point feature a brief, incidental cameo appearance from Ash Regan.

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Yesterday, readers, we warned you that “online newspaper polls are self-selecting and vulnerable to manipulation”. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

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We’ve already noted how the Unionist press appears to be trying to influence the outcome of the SNP leadership election, but last night the big beast of Scottish media – the BBC – waded into the fray.

A major piece by the Corporation’s Scotland editor James Cook focused on interviews with two of the three contenders – excluding Ash Regan – on the basis that both had launched their official campaigns yesterday while Regan’s isn’t expected to be until later this week.

That’s fair enough. No problems there, right?

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The press watchdog IPSO, which is responsible for the language used by the media with regard to transgender issues, is reviewing its policies.

We urge readers to participate in the consultation.

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This is incredible.

We couldn’t put it better than Alba MP Neale Hanvey, who said:

“A cunning plan… let’s fight to preserve a law we’ve just done a major U-turn on, completely undermining our claims it was ‘safe’. Remember when Scottish Labour played opposite sides of the argument? Well, even they didn’t argue both sides on the same front page on the same day.”

The SNP are a flailing shambles of incompetence, under a leader fast losing her iron grip on her own party as they watch her turning it into a laughing stock with growing horror. More and more disquiet reaches our ears from within her increasingly leaky and nervous Parliamentary groups. Who will be the first to tie their courage to a flagpole and make the move to mutiny? We can only wait and see.

Man, we wish we hadn’t used this headline up two days ago.

BBC Scotland’s Debate Night programme last night was rather peculiar. It took place in a mostly-empty studio, but clearly not due to COVID precautions because the people who were there were all jammed tightly together in the middle. (In fairness, given BBC Scotland’s audience ratings they may still have outnumbered television viewers.)

On an all-female panel it featured, “by popular demand”, someone presenter Stephen Jardine described as “one of our best-loved comedians”, a former electrician called Susie McCabe, who we’d never heard of in our lives. (She apparently presented the channel’s Hogmanay show, something no sane adult has watched since 1982.)

She made one particular contribution that set social media aflame.

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The entire mainstream Scottish media has picked up this afternoon on our intriguing scoop from yesterday about Peter Murrell lending the SNP £108,000 last year.

(The official SNP line is that it was for “cash flow reasons after the 2021 election”, although that doesn’t explain why less than half the money has been paid back more than 18 months later. Surely the party’s had enough cash flowing back in since then?)

And it’s enlightening to see how Scotland’s “proper” journalists handle such things.

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Left: February 2020. Right: November 2022.

Or possibly the other way round, we’re not sure. All we know is that we’re always surging upwards and forwards but somehow never actually getting anywhere.

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This legendary soliloquy never rang more true than on 23 November 2022.

Let’s be methodical about it.

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A week ago, readers, I had not the slightest interest in bringing Wings Over Scotland back full-time. I had my Twitter account again and was having fun and I was happy with that. It scratched the itch of being able to engage with politics (and people) without the depressing business of wading in it for work.

Having enjoyed a summer of long sunny walks feeding the swans and refreshing lager shandies in riverside pubs, I was preparing to hunker down over the cold dark winter and finally get some much-delayed writing for the Wings memoir done.

And then I witnessed the quite extraordinary sight of an elected member of Parliament, in the shape of the SNP’s pico-witted ambulant brain vacuum Karen Adam, publicly gloating about having managed to shut down the voice of someone critical of her party.

At the same time, an extremely minor blogger (the word “rival” would be to over-dignify them) re-opened hostilities in his campaign of self-declared “open warfare” against this site, with a rapid succession of posts (just a few of dozens) forming such a demented scattershot tirade that to patiently debunk all of it would have taken until Christmas.

And I’ll be honest, folks, it all pushed my buttons a wee bit. It really shouldn’t have, but it was properly outrageous and I’m occasionally human, so I thought “Sod it, if I’m going to have to put up with all this crap anyway I might as well make it worthwhile”.

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The response to yesterday’s post was pretty unanimous. So let’s find out for real.

Wings Over Scotland has been produced for free for the last three and a half years. Our last operational fundraiser was in May 2019. Then again, we’ve been retired for nearly half that time, with only occasional new posts.

But Scottish politics has never been in a more dire state than it is now, with the SNP stolen from its members by a tiny cabal not interested in independence but only in power for its own sake and the “queering” of Scottish society, while the opposition is a worthless ragbag of hapless incompetents and the media is a national embarrassment.

And since Wings stood back from the fray 18 months ago, absolutely nothing has stepped up to take its place. So if you want the job doing, it looks like we’ll have to do it ourselves again.

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Good heavens, readers. We’re afraid we’ve rather been forced into yet another post this month on our decreasingly-dormant website.

As many of you have already noticed, just a week after being unsuspended by Twitter (to surprisingly unanimous approval in the media from friends and enemies alike, and from some startlingly unexpected sources), early this afternoon the @WingsScotland account was kicked out again. According to the only email Twitter have sent us the reason for the sanction was “ban evasion”, which is perplexing since they’d just lifted the ban and there was nothing to evade.

But the plot subsequently thickened as a procession of SNP types claimed to be responsible, all triumphantly waving completely different supposed offences, none of which we’ve heard anything about.

Naturally we’ve enquired of Twitter what’s going on, and will update you as necessary. But to be honest with you, folks, if the SNP are this desperate to silence our voice, maybe it’s time we thought about returning for good.

Is it time to blow three-and-a-half years of dust off the old Fundraise-O-Tron and get back to work properly? Or should we stay in peaceful retirement and just stick a post up once in a while when we feel like it? What say you, chums?