While we wait for this story to unfold:
Let’s catch up on a few things. Scottish politics is moving very fast at the moment, and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss stuff.
The following article by Conor Matchett appears in today’s Scotsman:
It’s a pretty standard anti-Wings smear piece, except for this bit:
which is simply a flat-out lie. We can’t speak for Kenny MacAskill, but we do know for sure that Wings has NOT been contacted for comment by Mr Matchett.
We have an easily-accessible contact form and our details are known to the Scotsman from the last time we had to sue them for lying about us, but we have received no communication of any form from any representative of the newspaper in connection to this story. (We’ve checked our email Spam and Junk folders.)
We’d happily have provided a quote if we HAD been asked, to give the lazy hatchet job (perhaps “Matchett job”) at least a minimal veneer of balance and fairness as a boost to the badly-ailing paper’s “trusted, fact-checked journalism”. Since we’re banned from Twitter, perhaps someone could pass that on to Mr Matchett.
In the meantime, Wings readers should look forward to some more posts from SNP politicians, which we’ll be publishing later today.
You give these BBC types a bit of money and fame and oh dear.
Not sure what the poor horse did, mind you.
You can’t ask for more from a day than making this sleazy wee sexual pervert weep.
But be assured we’ll keep reaching for the prize time and again, folks.
Oh, and never, ever forget this true fact – Wings Over Scotland wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for James Mackenzie. We hope he’s in tears about that forever.
Ulster-bred (specifically the ultra-Loyalist stronghold of Antrim) columnist Neil Mackay, a man who’s been systematically undermining and dividing the Yes movement since at least 2015 while claiming to be part of it, has an opinion piece in the Herald today.
In its own way it’s an exemplar of the infiltrator’s craft. Let’s take a look.
Okay, we’re trolling a bit with the title there. But fair’s fair.
Because some REALLY shonky, and very obviously co-ordinated, shenanigans went on this past weekend, but at least the above is the truth.
In an attempt to freshen up its usual panel of tired and tiresome politicians and pundits, last night’s Question Time (ostensibly from an oddly-vague location in “the North East”) featured moderately-known circus fortune-teller Gypsy Rose Petulengro, crossing her palm with silver for some analysis in a short break from one of her celebrated seances.
The clip above was her take on whether Nicola Sturgeon would resign if either of the current inquiries found that she’d systematically and repeatedly lied to Parliament and broken the Ministerial Code, and the strange thing about it was that for someone who was professing to be looking into the future, she didn’t even appear to know the basic pertinent facts of the present or the past.
Iain Macwhirter has a good column on the farcical Fabiani inquiry in the Herald today. But one piece of it really jumped out at us.
Wait, what?
We’re feeling a bit confused this morning, readers. Maybe someone can help.
Below is the key part of the letter sent by the Clerks of the Scottish Parliament, acting on behalf of the Fabiani committee, to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) a week and a half ago, requesting material for their investigation into the Scottish Government’s botched handling of false allegations against Alex Salmond.
As we’d told you at the time, the request was a sham, designed to produce nothing of any value, because it carefully excluded the only person whose communications with Sue Ruddick were actually of relevance – SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.
(Murrell being an employee of the party, NOT a member of the Scottish Government, a civil servant or a special adviser.)
But yesterday it all went really weird.
Yesterday was Wings’ biggest day of traffic in January – something which was no small beer, because January was this site’s busiest month for traffic since June 2017. The majority of it was down to one story – our shocking scoop about the incredibly shady goings-on earlier that day at a meeting of the SNP’s National Executive Council.
The reaction to it was absolutely explosive. Half of the Parliamentary SNP spent the whole night running around social media frantically firefighting their own members, who were absolutely furious about what they’d just discovered. Poisonous abuse from the party’s woke faction poured out like never before. We got called every kind of bigot under the sun by SNP officeholders.
(The article, of course, made no mention of any sort of bisexual people, Jewish people, trans people or women as a group, let alone actually being prejudiced against anyone. Ironically just about the only kind of prejudice that wasn’t alleged was ageism, possibly because it might have looked a smidge too ironic coming from a bunch of bedwetting children whose core ideological stance is that anyone over 29 is a Nazi.)
But there was one thing you DIDN’T read amid the torrents of hate.
You didn’t read anyone saying a single word of the post was untrue.
This site spent a lot of the indyref documenting the Scottish media’s obsession with “SNP accused” articles, in which they’d make a big deal out of any random nobody accusing the SNP of some absurdly trivial misdeed.
But today, curiously, absolutely none of them have covered this:
Which is weird, because that seems like, y’know, quite a big story.
There’s literally nothing about this that isn’t toe-curlingly embarrassing:
The only challenge is knowing where to start.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
