Wings Over Scotland

Although we’re retired we already wrote this, so we may as well put it up for the 99.9% of Scots who don’t read the comments on David Leask‘s columns in the Herald.

Scotland’s worst, most reliably wrong and most pathologically insecure self-identified “real journalist” rehashed one of his favourite hobby-horses yesterday, namely that it’s a “nationalist myth” that Scotland got poorer after discovering oil in the North Sea.

It’s a claim he’s been banging on about since at least 2014, without ever providing a scrap of evidence to support it (his standard modus operandi), and yesterday was no exception. So let’s show Little Dave how proper big-boy journalists do it.

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Our sincerest congratulations go to The National on what by our count is their 250th “INDY IS COMING SOON!” front page. A real landmark.

Any readers pointing out that there was a “pro-indy majority and mandate for indyref2” after the 2016 Holyrood election, and yet here we are five years later without indyref2 having actually happened even though the Parliament voted for it twice, can only be MI5 Unionist plants and must of course be shunned and vilified and ideally put in prison if at all possible.

We’re so excited we’re already looking forward to the May 2026 version.

Wings just can’t seem to stop breaking traffic records these days.

Despite having considerably fewer posts (46 to March’s 69), April saw the highest number of unique visitors to the site in close to three years. And that’s even more remarkable when you consider how hard just about everyone is trying to stop them.

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From 1964:

How the times change, eh?

The furore over a declaration signed by a number of Scottish organisations which appears to clearly call for the age of sexual consent to be reduced to 10 continues today, with a couple of appallingly biased articles in the Scotsman and the Times which attempt to use the controversy to attack both the Alba Party (as a distraction from its powerful key manifesto release on women’s rights) and this website.

Even just the tweet above by the author of the Times piece fails all kinds of basic journalistic standards of impartiality, but the article itself is vastly worse.

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At the weekend we all beheld the bizarre sight of two supposed investigative Scottish politics journalists sneering and trying to play down what appeared to be a genuinely major story about a live police inquiry into a possible £600,000 criminal fraud involving the party of government in Scotland.

Both of them work for the same rival outlet, so the most generous interpretation that could reasonably be put on their curious behaviour is that they were simply trying to focus attention instead on that outlet’s own big Sunday splash – also ostensibly a story of political fraud, albeit on a much smaller scale.

So let’s just clear that one up now to help them out.

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Fresh from being embarrassed over a ridiculous smear story this week about someone complaining to the police about the use of a well-known political phrase by a Wings commenter, Tom Gordon of the Herald went on quite the attack yesterday.

The thread, which contains a number of basic factual errors about events*, continued for several more tweets all generally rubbishing our scoop from Friday afternoon and suggesting that no proper journalist (“the rest of us”) would have run the story.

So he must be feeling quite left out this morning.

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While we were out this afternoon diligently patrolling for bears in the 20C beauty of a Bath early spring (largely because there’s a rather implausible 40% chance of snow forecast for next Wednesday), an email flooded in from Tom Gordon of the Herald.

“Hello Stuart. We’ve been contacted by a reader who says he also contacted you about a post on the website in the early hours of Saturday. Referring to Nicola Sturgeon, the poster says “Decapitating this witch would stop the SNP dead in their tracks.” 

Our reader, Ian Reid, an SNP activist in the Borders, has been a regular Wings reader but was taken aback by the language. He had hoped you would have deleted the post, but that hasn’t happened.

He has reported it to the police and given a statement to them.

He has also given us these comments on why the Alba Party should condemn this sort of material and cut its ties to the Wings site.

“Alex Salmond and the leaders of the new party need to separate themselves from that, they need to call it out. They seem to be trying to set themselves up as the moral guardians for women’s rights, which I absolutely support. At the same time, we’ve got somebody posting this on a blog that they clearly associate with and clearly use.

On the one hand, they’re talking about gender-proofing their policies, which is great. On the other hand, they’ve got this where a woman is being described as the devil herself, and where there’s a reference to decapitating the witch having a justifiable end.

That needs to be called out. The party needs to come out and say something about it. The best possible outcome would be that they do condemn it. It would be such a powerful message. Separating themselves from that cesspit would be a very politically astute thing for them. As long as they don’t, it’s colluding with it, it’s condoning it.”

This is for a potential story online and in print.

Would you care to comment?”

And, y’know, of course we would.

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Every Yes supporter in Scotland dreamed of having our own Mandela to lead us to freedom. Unfortunately, we wanted Nelson but we got Winnie instead.

And now our country is no longer a safe place.

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It is our grave duty to inform readers that Kenny “Kezia Dugdale will be the next First Minister” Farquharson of The Times has done a tweet again.

It’s a curious thing to say before either of the inquiries has delivered its report. The only people who are asserting that Sturgeon has been somehow cleared of involvement in a conspiracy are the SNP, and even their own voters are split down the middle on it.

But let’s just check on how big the SNP are winning right now.

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