Wings Over Scotland

My legal team and I have just received, unexpectedly early, the sheriff’s verdict in my defamation case against Kezia Dugdale. The short and paraphrased version is that yes, she did defame me by inaccurately calling me a homophobe, but because she’s an idiot who doesn’t know what words mean, she’s allowed to, so we lose.

Some key passages of the 37-page judgement are appended below.

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It’s always nice to see Michelle Mone in the news again, especially when the Tory peer crowbars an attempted intervention into Scottish politics into everything she does.

And since there’s not much else going on, it seemed like a good excuse to have a wee delve into what she’s been up to lately.

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Have a great one, readers.

I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.

Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.

I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)

They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.

Because the other way never ends anywhere good.

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Great news, readers! After years of requests, it’s now finally possible to possess and cherish your very own adorable cuddly toy version of Wings’ symbolic embodiment of benign and welcoming independence, Hamish the lion!

Admittedly you’ll have to buy some slacker’s book of cartoons to get one, but that’s surely a small price to pay.

This site is still hampered by the consequences of TotallyUnbelievableMadnessGate, so until normal service is resumed here’s a quick recap of a few stories from the last few days you may have missed.

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Anybody got any news?

Since it now looks increasingly like we might be doing this indyref thing all over again pretty soon, we thought you’d like to meet our Fulfilment Department:

This short video by the ever-excellent Phantom Power Films takes you to the heart of AyeMail, who not only handle the delivery of immaculately-packaged donor perks for pro-indy fundraisers and things like the Wee Black Book, but also produce a growing range of merchandise direct, ensuring that as much money as possible stays within the Yes movement.

If you want some stuff made for Indyref 2 – This Time It’s An Emergency, we can recommend their various services without hesitation.

*No payments or incentives of any kind in either direction were solicited or received for this endorsement.

It’s time to find out just how alert you really are, readers.

The answers to each of the 24 questions below about Scottish politics in 2015 can be found in Wings articles. But no Googling – we’ll know.

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We had no idea it was so hard to give money away, to be honest. Indiegogo delivered the final tranche of donations from our recent anti-poverty fundraiser last night, and we’ve now sent it all on to good causes.

We said previously that we didn’t want to spread it too thinly, because while the sum was 30 times what we set out to raise it’ll barely make the tiniest of scratches on the surface of poverty in Scotland, so we’ve split it between half-a-dozen organisations. For the record, this post lists where it went.

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Today, readers, we’re slowly building our way up to an aneurysm trying to give away a fairly sizeable sum of money to foodbanks and other charities, who appear to have collectively decided that that should be an experience only slightly less challenging than the Krypton Factor assault course. (Ask your parents.)

While our nervous breakdown continues apace, we thought we’d draw your attention to this story in the Independent about how the new Conservative government has been avoiding putting any senior ministers up for questioning by the media.

It’s a tactic you may recall from the “Better Together” campaign, and we thought you might like to read this piece (and more here) by a videogame-journalism friend of ours which explains what’s going on when it happens.

We’ll hopefully be back with you soon.

As we write, Alistair Carmichael’s QC is two hours into a seemingly-interminable drone in an Edinburgh courtroom, in a case brought by ordinary citizens against a former government minister funded by a public appeal. Our own recent fundraiser, inspired by a case a world away from such high-minded concerns, closed a few days ago on a phenomenal total of £16,083.

Indiegogo have now disbursed the first half of the money (the rest, specifically that part that was donated by credit card, should follow in the next fortnight), so now we need to decide what to do with it.

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