Wings Over Scotland

Slacky The Holiday Boy is once again on his monthly two-week break, so it falls to us to try to amuse you on a Saturday morning with an image of some sort. Unfortunately very little funny is happening in Scottish politics, so all we’ve got is this.

Yes, the two most popular politics websites in Scotland at the moment are one that’s been retired for three months and one whose author is currently in prison. All hail that new media, eh?

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Craig Murray, a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, the father of a newborn child, a man in very poor health and one who has no prior convictions, handed himself over to the Scottish police last Sunday morning. He becomes the first person ever to be imprisoned on the obscure and vaguely defined charge of “jigsaw identification”.

Murray is also the first person to be jailed in Britain for contempt of court for their journalism in half a century – a period when such different legal and moral values prevailed that the British establishment had only just ended the prosecution of “homosexuals” and the jailing of women for having abortions.

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Please note the below press release regarding the impending incarceration of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray

[29/07/2021; 15:52 pm; Edinburgh]

Legal precedent will be set tomorrow as Craig Murray will be the first person to be imprisoned on the charge of jigsaw identification in the UK, and indeed in the entire world. Scotland’s second most senior judge, Lady Dorrian, sentenced Murray to 8 months of incarceration following a contempt of court charge for ‘jigsaw identification’ relating to the trial against Alex Salmond.

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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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