Wings Over Scotland

I hope you’ll forgive a personal indulgence here, folks.

Especially alert readers may recall that just before the independence referendum in 2014 I came home and attended a number of events, including being smuggled into a huge, fascinating and enlightening Muslim Friends Of Labour meeting at the Marriot Hotel in Glasgow just a few days ahead of the vote.

The man who managed to somehow get a solitary white guy into a room of 1000 Asian people was my friend Irshad Malik (known to all simply as Malik). At the time Malik was running a convenience store in Bathgate (in addition to an office job elsewhere), where my parents live and have known him for many years.

He’s a committed Yesser, a tireless worker and gave The Wee Blue Book out in the shop (one of very few places in Bathgate which sold The National from day 1).

I mention this now because he’s in a spot of bother, and I owe him one.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

We can’t help feeling there’s a simpler way of putting that.